The Alternate Saga
by skywalker05
Summary: Luke Skywalker is transported to an AU era where the Empire won the Galactic Civil War.
1. Far, Far Away

Star Wars: The Alternate Saga

by Cy Skywalker

based on the movies by George Lucas and not in any way entirely owned by said Cy.

**Chapter 1: Far, Far Away**

**4 standard years after the founding of the Jedi academy at Yavin 4**

Over the multicolored sphere of Corellia, its silver and brown moons like baubles in an abstract floating sculpture, a simple starship engaged its blazing blue drives in acceleration toward the planet.

he four tube-shaped engines made a barely noticeable rumble under the feet of the occupants of the ship; a yellow-green skinned Twi'lek, his lekku tattooed with a flame-like pattern of branching spikes from their tips to his forehead, wearing a black and teal flightsuit, and a relaxing female Pho Ph'eahian. She was lean, dressed in a one-piece tan coverall, her long navy blue hair tied back, two arms crossed, the third twined in the strands of hair near her fanlike ear, and the fourth in her lap. She was the captain of this ship the Twi'lek had employed to Corellia, making part of the agreement the strict order of ask no questions.

The Twi'lek, his back to the captain though he knew she was half watching him, slightly shifted so that the holoprojector before him was totally out of her sight as a burly human male appeared on its static-filled projection surface. The contact had black hair and beard and wore gray and red, and his formal clothing was overlaid with a bandoleer over one shoulder and a leather bag strap over the other. The Imperial crest showed in white on his shoulders and bag.

"Chakra." He spoke in a rasping, old voice, older than his face.

"You have it?"Chakra the Twi'lek asked curtly. .

The human nodded vigorously. " Sure I've got it. Can you pay?"

"Ten thousand."

"Ten thousand."

"And you're sure it's the real thing?" This was said with menace.

"It is the real thing, Chakra. The only real thing. The deal is set. You know where to meet me."

Chakra flicked off the holoprojector impatiently. Indeed the deal had been set, with this unpleasant human go-between, and as soon as this particular item was out of the hands of the Imperial Remnant Chakra would put as much distance between them and himself as he could for a while. He didn't even know what this item was, something from a private collection that whatever warlord was in control of the Remnant now wanted because the Empire had had it back in the day when they could hold on to their equipment. And as an information and artifacts broker for whatever hidden organization, bounty hunter or Hutt would pay him, Chakra was not on very good terms with either the Empire or the Republic, just with himself. And with the credits from this steal he maybe could buy his own ship back from that _sleemo_ of a _murishani_, that made such a odds-poor deal and cheated...

The Pho Ph'eahian leaned back in her seat and mentally estimated that she had five, ten minutes before needing to get to the cockpit for entrance into Corellian airspace. She was just being paid by this Twi'lek, but she knew all she needed for the mission...everything about him.


	2. Irma Haeammon

**Chapter 2: Irma Haeammon**

The point of Corran Horn's lightsaber was held still unwavering as the information broker and Imperial agent Jado Krake thumbed his commlink off. Behind Corran Luke Skywalker watched his fellow Jedi and Jado Krake both for signs of their character, how they would handle themselves in this confrontation. Krake and his coconspirator, who had spoken a second before, the one called Chakra, had something important, all the Jedi's varied sources said, but no one seemed to know what exactly it was.

Corran's lightsaber snapped out of existence and the Remnant agent visibly relaxed, scowling as he pushed the commlink into one of his many pockets. "What do you want?" He growled. He had asked the same question once before, when Corran and Luke had met him in the street, and then their answer had been to watch him, to listen to him talk to his contact. Now Corran replied;

"What's this item your friend up there wants?"

"Uhm, I don' know what it is. I'm just delivery." He took a step as if to move past Corran. Around them people took no notice of the encounter, more concerned with themselves, the ocean view from Coronet or flimsi directions in their hands.

Luke Skywalker lightly put his hand on Krake's shoulder and held the agent between himself and Corran and the metal railing that marked the beginning of the beach.

"Show us the item."

Krake scowled and slowly unlatched the black branded bag at his side, pulling out a flimsi printout and a round metal sphere, the top layered like flower petals set one over another, or like a pinecone, gleaming dark silver. Luke received the two, held the paper flat and read

_Leeondro K'Saavis Imperial mech. To Jado Krake, rep.:_

_To be delivered to Leeondro K'Saavis care of Watchersbane; untested; manufac. Kuat. Call code GBLYYXP2610. _

So this thing, this spheroid item in Luke's hand, was an experimental device from Kuat's well-known engineers, packaged specially for the Empire. Luke folded the letter, handed it to Corran to read and took the sphere in both hands. The bottom half was smooth silver, the top ridged with louvers or slits, and no apparent control surfaces.

"You don't know what this is." Luke asked again, though it was more a statement than a question.

Krake had been simply standing beside them during the investigation, though the Jedi know he had considered actions and discarded them. Now the Imperial abandoned that mien and snapped, "I don't know anything about the blasted thing, but I'm getting good credits to deliver it." The agent's big hands grasped the machine and pulled it from Luke. Corran, closer to Krake, moved to restrain the agent but Luke saw Krake's hands moving, clicking the flaps of the sphere up and around the machine like a tri-D jigsaw puzzle.

"Corran!" He warned, and the Force was harnessed to pull the machine from Krake's hands.

The agent held on,still manipulting the machine's sides so when it went off he was a few paces from the Jedi with his hands around the sphere, and his fingers nearly touching Luke's. The sphere emitted something like white light, and Jado Krake threw himself backwards and sprinted from it. Corran was a step away and going after Krake a second later, with the machine in Luke's hands.

Luke Skywalker knew later he should have dropped it, let it go and ran, but the light held his eyes, the way it entered and never mixed with or was dulled by the color of the cloudless ocean sky.

In a flash there was nothingness, whiteness, then again the sea, sky and city. Something to the right moved and there was Corran, ghostly, flickering, crouched by the railing with one hand splayed against the pavement, then his form disappeared. A line of music floated through Luke's mind, something he felt was connected irrevocably to himself, then he was back and the streets were filled again with people.

The machine was gone, Luke's hands empty, Corran and Jado both nowhere on the crowded expanse of the boardwalk.

Luke let himself into the Force, searching the landscape of that encompassing awareness, and they were not there. But the Force itself seemed to be unstable or damaged, flickering in and out of focus or clarity like a crackling subspace transmitter, like the quick image of Corran. Senses, people and emotions were flickers then a jumble, unreadable, then flicker again.

Luke returned to only his mundane senses, knowing that something very strange had happened, and that that experimental machine had done what it was supposed to do.

Beside the warped state of the Force and the absence of Corran and Krake, everything seemed the same, the crowds on the boardwalk and scattered groupings on the beach in this early season. There was no disturbance any type of explosion would have caused. It was as if only Luke himself had been transported to some far off location where his companions weren't. But this was Corellia. A different location in time, then?

The holographic display scrolling above a storefront said the current date, day and time in standard and Corellian, the same numbers but a minute later than when he had last looked at it, when Jado Krake was speaking with his contact.

Quietly Luke walked into the thickness of life that was the city, toward a restaurant he and Corran had patronized before. The owner, a big man behind the bar counter in a corner the Jedi had not bothered with previously, insisted Luke buy something before he answer any questions. Though Luke could have gotten the information easier he ordered a glass of cool water and sat at the bar with his hands around it, savoring the cold. The bar man was dark of skin, dark of close-cropped hair and dark of clothing, though the silver mechanism that was his left arm and wrist ruined any impression of outstanding black he may have wanted to present.

"What year is it?" Luke asked, and the look in his eyes must have told the man not to question, for he only glanced at the Jedi's shadowed face and gave the date Luke already knew. So the sphere was indeed not a time machine. But _now_ was not what it had been, the Force and something else inside told him that.

What to ask? He looked around and saw nothing different.

The bartender followed his gaze, then smiled slightly, leaning his head against one fleshy hand. "You a runaway or what?" His smile widened, his eyes narrowing and giving the wrinkled face the general appearance of a Gammorean's. "A Rebel?"

Luke took a sip of water. "A Rebel?" He echoed, just enough of a question to invite an answer.

The man gave another piggish smile. "Where you been?"

"Outer Rim." Luke slipped a 5-credit chip onto the rough surface of the counter. "Tell me about the Rebels."

The man pocketed the chip and leaned over the counter, the sticky unpleasant smell of alcohol on his breath. "There was an attack on a HoloNet beacon near Dreeklyn, Reecee, something like that. They got fighters and a Mon Cal cruiser now. We got a coupla Destroyers and wiped em out, but I don't know if this means they're comin back or what. You didn't hear that?"

"No." So the Empire was in command here-now? But the time had not changed. "Tell me more about the Empire." He said, prepared to augment the possibly suspicious question with the Force.

The barman was suspicious, and asked, "What's your name, _peedunkie_?"

"I was never here," Luke murmured, waved his hand, made the man's recent memories into a blank slate, and left. He walked into a world where all he had worked for in the first half of his life, all that his sister, Han, their children, the Jedi had worked for was gone. Stormtroopers stood at each corner in the deep sections of the city, and the black and white flag of the Imperial crest flew from the tallest towers.


	3. Ootmian

Chapter 3: Ootmian

He returned to the boardwalk and, though he knew it made no real sense, stood where he had arrived and touched the Force. It was irritatingly patchy, insubstantial still.

Luke sighed. He did not have or know how to work the machine, how to again release the fogging light. But this place, though he felt that he should stay in case anything else happened, was unsafe. The stormtroopers were everywhere in the city, their senses seeming to be physically tainted with the feel of the evil of the Empire.

He began to head for his ship. He and Corran, chasing the almost forgotten "artifact smugglers" that had the machine, had come in their X-wings, and the two fighters should be at the main Coronet docking bays, in 55 and 56. And with his ship...he could go somewhere else, see what the exact state of the Empire and Rebellion and galaxy was. And he would feel more comfortable.

Luke was halfway to the spaceport when he saw a squadron of six stormtroopers pass through an alley onto the street he was on, and knew a Force-user was near, with its attention on himself. He looked up and stretched out with his senses, and knew that the squadron was coming up behind him, the Force-user not far behind and joining with them.

The squad drew level with Luke in a few seconds and one gestured with an armored hand--arrogant--for Luke to stop. He did, his back to the busy street, facing a blue-black durasteel and glass building, its entrance twenty floors up at the level of the skylanes.

"Where're you going?" The metallic voice asked.

"To the spaceport," He replied, calm, knowing this was the truth.

"What's your name?" The lead trooper asked, and a subordinate handed him a datapad as though to check the name Luke would give against a list.

There was no one around , and the glimmer of the Force-user at the edge of his awareness was far away, to far to help if it was a friend or to attack if it was a foe.

"You don't need to know my name." The lead stormtrooper's mind was weak; his was the type of soldier who did what they were told, and no more.

"I don't need to know your name," the trooper said absently, and the Force was moving behind his hidden eyes.

"I can go about my business."

"You can go about your business."

"You can go about your business." They began to turn away and another man slipped between their ranks and stood before Luke. He was short, dressed in a green and brown tunic and black pants, and carried no visible weapon. The Force moved dark and angry within him.

"This is the one!" He snapped to the stormtroopers and they turned back in unison and held their blasters at the ready.

Luke could sense both that this was a hostile dark Force-user, probably hired, trained or both by the Empire, and that the little man's skills were considerably less than his own.

"Where are you going?" The dark Jedi asked the same question his troopers had, obviously the one of the most importance, for some reason.

Luke answered the same way he had before. "The spaceport. What does the Empire mind in that?"

"What's a grown Sith doin' out here alone? Don't think I can't know."

It should be apparent to this man, Luke knew, that he, Luke, wasn't a Sith. But this was not the time to emphasize that mistake. The Imperial's eyes flicked to his squad at this hesitation, and then the command;

"Take him."

The troopers raised their guns and the Force-user his hands, and Luke felt an invisible grip at his throat and his last breath catch within. Fear threatened for a split second.

Without moving Luke pushed the little Sith away, knocking his thoughts from attack and his head against the hard armored ankle of one of the stormtroopers. He scrambled up holding the back of his neck, and the trooper he had unbalanced clicked the setting on his blaster and fired a stun bolt. Luke dodged it, sent a wave of Force energy against them before a second bolt could be fired, and began to run for bay 56.

Behind a corner now, the Force-user seethed with anger, throwing off the effects of the wave though his troops were mostly nervous and trying to retain their dignity after falling like so many young trees in a windstorm. Luke Skywalker just wanted off this world, to set his course for somewhere far away and to sit in the darkness of hyperspace and think about what could have happened so that the Empire won. It seemed so wrong to hm.The warped state of the Force and something inside and attuned to his own reality told him this should not be. Where, what battle or significant event or faulty decision of his own had made this place?

On the outside, the visible bowl of the docking bays, the faded sign that said 56 and had the spaceport master's old dog lounging below it, and the silver shape of Luke's X-Wing within faded white walls was just as it had been when he and Corran had arrived from Yavin, but something still was wrong.

Quickly as possible Luke crossed to the ship, climbed and pushed the ladder away as he slid into the familiar confines of the cockpit. The ladder was a resource of the spaceport; they would see to it after he left.

He'd decided quickly to go to Dagobah. Before, he had thought Mon Cal, Reecee, just to see the state of things, but he saw the state now. Yavin 4 was out of the question; the praxeum undoubtably wasn't even there. So on Dagobah he could hide from the Empire, and possibly Master Yoda would be there and he could get some answers.

Luke turned for his crash webbing and the ship disappeared from around him, flicking out like a hologram when you flip through channels and each image flashes out of existence after the other. The Force was disturbed, was lost and then again was there and wrong.

Luke fell through where his ship had been, instinctively rolled when he felt the ground catch his body, seconds before gravity would have slammed him against it, came out of the roll on one knee and stood.

Looking back, the X-Wing was obviously and irrevocably gone. Brief confusion was replaced by brief realization that the ship really had no reason to be here in this Imperial-held world. Luke and Corran had not arrived here in these ships, they were but residue, a glitch...

Luke closed his eyes and breathed a nearly silent sigh for a moment, his right hand clenched and his mind fighting itself. Fear leads to the dark side of the Force, yes, but as much so does confusion, a sense of helplessness, lonliness. Luke mastered these things and turned away from what he had thought was in the docking bay and slipped out, aware of the Sith and his squadron of stormtroopers still trailing him.


	4. Flight

**Chapter 4: Flight**

Luke again took to the streets. The crowd flowed around him, varied individuals with the human Corellians prevalent, none knowing what Luke kept as his own; the knowledge of his own true world. He knew not to reveal to anyone, even potential allies, his point of origin, for they would not believe him.

A block and a half from the spaceport was an information center/hotel complex, and Luke entered it. Inside it was a clean, modern reception room all in shades of silver and red, and twin flights of stairs curved up to a bank of turbolifts and the entrance to the hotel, and below in the curve of the stairways were the wide spaced tables of a small restaurant. Immediately to the left a Drall sat behind a long counter tapping at a datapad with its stubby, clawed fingers.

Luke went to the Drall receptionist and the alien looked up and blinked its moist black eyes.

"I need passage off Corellia." Luke said, and the Drall pulled a thick book onto the desk beside them.

"Where to?" It asked in a high female voice, though the gender wasn't evident on its thickly furred body.

There would be no passenger liners to Dagobah. "The Outer Rim."

The Drall nodded and looked down at the book. She had slid a claw down the page and looked back at Luke for a second or less when her customer jumped up, kicked against the counter and backflipped off it, and a beam of intense energy inbedded itself in the counter. Her datapad screen shattered, and the Drall fainted off her stool.

Luke had known the stormtrooper squadron had followed him, and his only surprise was that they would so readily shoot in a public place like this. All heads turned in the restaurant's dining area as the stormtroopers spread themselves in a half-circle formation against the wall, and the mien of the room became one of agitation and wondering immediately.

The Sith entered behind his squad looking bedraggled, his black hair messed and all his attention focused on his quarry. "Stop! The Emperor commands that a personage of your occupation be brought under guard for questioning--"

'_A personage of my occupation.'_ Luke laughed to himself, though it was with a grim humor. This was the Jedi Purge mentality, dangerous and very, very predictable. But it meant, as he had known, that the Sith knew what he was, and nothing would prevent them from destroying him except a fight lost, not the proximity of innocent, normal people or that Luke's background and motive were unknown. They would not hesitate to kill him.

For a moment there was a standstill. Then the Force-user stepped forward and shouted in his high voice; "Don't move!"

Luke activated his lightsaber.

The Force-user gestured to his troops and moved back into the alcove of the double doors into the complex, and the troopers opened fire. Red howling bolts lanced from their blaster rifles, and the unsheathed green blade in Luke's hands sent each back to its owner as patrons of the restaurant fled the scene, back inside or up the stairs, screams and shouts adding to the thrum of the lightsaber and shriek of the lasers, loud in Luke's ears.

Fifteen seconds and the troopers were down, two dead, five clutching hands or legs or bodies seared by their own fire, and the Force user stood watching Luke with hatred in his eyes.

Luke jumped to the right, deactivating his lightsaber for freedom of movement though quite willing to use it again if the opportunity presented itself. Llightning escaped the Sith's fingers and crackled over where Luke had stood before, though he escaped it now by a foot or more.

Luke's opinion of the Force-user's powers went up a notch, and again his lightsaber was live in his hands as his opponent stalked forward. Nearly all from the restaurant had fled; a group was left at the meeting point of the two stairways frantically waiting for the next turbolift, some peering cautiously over the edge of the stairs to see the conflict below, one crying. Farthest from the entranceway one still sat, a large, strange alien, looking more like it should be in a dark cantina rather then this place. Luke noted it and backed up a step into the shadow of the right stairway, opposite the alien, the shadow taking the Sith's sense of sight from him.

A heavy chair from one of the restaurant's tables smashed against the stairwell above his hiding place, and before a second could come, aimed better, Luke stepped out and threw the Force against the chair. It caught the Sith on the chest and head and threw him backwards sprawling into the entrance area. He did not get up.

Luke lowered his hands and walked back into the open space where Sith and chair lay immobile against the hard floor, the latter skewed and on top of the former. The little Sith wasn't dead, just knocked out, and Luke passed him by, returning to the service desk. The Drall was hiding behind her counter, and as he drew near she scrambled, wide-eyed and fearful, to remount her high stool and turn the book of departing ships toward him, her finger shaking as she pointed to "_Espera Karva_; departure 16:40 to Sernpidal City, Sernpidal."

The Sith was behind him again. The Drall pointed and tried to say something, and Luke smiled to reassure her. Behind him there was a loud thump, and the Drall dropped to the floor again.

Turning around he saw all he expected to see, though it still looked strange. The alien from the corner had one foot clamped down on the little human's back, and when the Force-user raised his hands to execute a Force push the long claw of the alien's middle toe was poked into his back, and his hands returned to the floor. Luke's smile for the Drall became one of triumph, and he reached with the Force into the Sith's mind--he struggled and again the claw cut in--and knocked him out again.

"Thank you." Luke said, and extended his hand to the alien, who clasped it for a moment and took its foot from the Sith's back. It was a large creature covered in short, white fur, its body tilted forward with the thick legs and clawed feet like a fulcrum between the tail and front section, with golden ribbed wings folded along its sides and a multitude of limbs. The head was beaked, though when it opened its mouth it could be seem to have almost a second covering inside that the beak overlapped and protected, more like a snout, and had large green and back eyes. It had humanlike arms and hands, with which it had shaken Luke's hand, above a second set of arms with long claws and curved scythes of bone. The wings had their own claws with hooks and small-clawed fingers. It wore no clothes, being covered in fur, though a sheath and blaster were belted to its right leg, and it was not Force sensitive and nearly twice as tall as Luke.

"You're welcome," it said in a deep, throaty voice, the mouth working behind the sharp edges of the beak to produce accented Basic. "You need a trip offplanet."

Luke nodded. There was no hostility to the alien's word. He was willing to help because he knew what it was like--to a point--to be in Luke's position of fleeing a planet.

"We've got a ship. If you're ready to leave now we can get out of here before your friends bring reinforcements."

Luke glanced at the stormtroopers, and there were two out of five left, the other survivors gone certainly to call more. He told the first name he could think of; "I'm Corran Horn. I'll go with you if you're headed my way..."

The alien began walking toward the doorway, claws clicking on the floor. " I suppose that depends on where your way is." He tilted his head and looked at Luke.

"Dagobah." Luke ventured.

"Never heard of it. But we'll get you there. I'm Captain Paqs Patra the Second of the _Orion_. Call me Patra and don't throw up in our ship and I'll get you wherever."

Luke smiled and the alien bobbed his head once in confermation and led the way out, picking his way through the remains of the stormtrooper contingent casually. Luke studied his strange form again and decided he really didn't know enough about him, not even his species, but nor did he have time to ask. There was really no reason to trust Paqs Patra the Second at this moment, but there was nothing to say he couldn't be trusted, and his actions against the Sith seemed to say he was good. As soon as he got to Dagobah--at least now that portion of the half-formed plan would work--this messed-up galaxy could forget he had ever existed. Too quickly rose the question of what he would do if Master Yoda wasn't there, or could do nothing to change the state of the predicament he was in.

Paqs Patra's ship was in docking bay 143, a medium-sized craft like Kyle Katarn's _Raven's Claw_. The docking ramp opened onto a cockpit/living area with walls of black metal like the outside of the ship, and the bow and ceiling were decorated with the many lights and indicators used on starships to track themselves through the near-infinity of the galaxy. Behind this room were hatches to a refresher and cargo bay, and the ion engine tucked between the ship's long drive tubes.

Patra's footclaws clicked on the metal as the alien crossed the room and settled before the control console, in a sling of crash webbing, the fingers of his wings curled around a brace above his head and his long body, his four arms darting along the console prepping the engine.

Luke looked back for a moment, out over the walls to the multicolored city towers, and for some reason, as the ramp went up and he lost the view of Coronet, a feeling like a sickness told him he would never see this safe haven again.


	5. A New Hope

**Chapter 5: A New Hope**

But it really wasn't safe at all, he knew, and that was massively physically present as the Orion broke atmosphere and ahead, casting their own shadows on the tops of white clouds, were two squared-off wedge forms of Star Destroyers.

Luke rose from his seat behind Patra's sling for a moment and again he was above Tatooine, far in another past, and Han Solo was assuring Ben Kenobi that they would pass these war machines of the Empire by and go to meet that beautiful princess he had seen in the hologram. But it was not to be. It had been.

The alien inquired as to where Luke wanted to go and he gave him the long-memorized coordinates for Dagobah. Patra punched them in, though with disbelief about the distance to the place and that he had no knowledge of its existence. There was a quick check commmed from the Star Destroyers and Patra gave them a satisfactory code for departure, and the space around the _Orion_ became the raging calm of hyperspace.

As Patra went into the cargo bay Luke again stood up and looked around. There were many diversions for the long soarings through space, games, things on the HoloNet, simple conversation between people who were now captain and passenger. Luke didn't feel like doing any of these things. There was to much on his mind, like a fog, though thinking back through what had really happened was simple, if strange.

So he turned and stood in the hatch to the back and watched Patra move boxes around and peer into a few of them, muttering to himself in a clacking tongue. After a moment he fixed Luke with a sharp eye and rustled the thin skin of his wings, saying nothing but questioning.

"I," Luke looked at the floor for a moment and slapped one hand against the hatch, "if you need any help I'll do something."

No, no I'm fine." His gaze had drifted between Luke and the next stack of crates, now it returned to Luke. "You told me you wouldn't throw up, but you're not one of those types that gets so bored in space flight they gotta bother everybody else, right?"

Luke took this as a light rebuke, laughed slightly and left.

In the cockpit he patched into the HoloNet and looked up history on a public database. The footage there told him all he needed to know; the war had been won--or lost--at the battle of Yavin. That planet had been destroyed by the Imperial Death Star's superlaser before Luke--before I, he had to tell himself--could destroy the battle station. After that; "the remnants of the rebellion were easily disposed of."

Again he sighed, and changed the Holonet screen to one of recent news. All the headlines were mundane if showing the casual cruelty of the Empire; Mon Cal/Quarren Dispute to be settled by Imperial Troops. Looting continues in Coruscant Financial District. Antion Rebuke Trade Agreements. Superstar Dorana Race to wed Nukron Kolak...

When Luke got to that last one he changed the net back to the database and searched information by planet; Coruscant, Tatooine, Corellia, Dagobah. The Dagobah system was not listed. In the Coruscant listing it said the headquarters of the Emperor had changed from Imperial City to a more Coreward world called Had Abbadon, but the information on the new headquarters was sparce, just scientific things; gravity, system type. For a few hours Luke researched. All reports of the Old Republic and most of the Rebellion were conveniently missing. When the net outlived its usefulness he turned to star charts. Yavin 4 and Alderaan were nonexistent.

They spent two and a half days in space, each keeping mostly to himself. Even in this time Luke didn't learn much about Paqs Patra; in the times they spoke, mostly before "night" when Patra checked their coordinates between Corellia and Dagobah, he learned only that Patra worked as a freelance carrier of cargo and occasionally a conveyer of passengers. Patra stayed in the cargo bay and Luke in the cockpit; he even slept there, and in the days between stared into space and the currents of the Force, or worried about the future and what had been done with the past, overshadowed by the present. When he realized he was sinking into regret he would meditate, and make himself think he was home. It reminded him of, on Tattooine, dreaming of space battles to escape the mundanity of reality.

And then Dagobah was before them. Luke knew it before Patra came in and hooked his claws in position to bring the _Orion_ out of hyperspace. The starlines streaked, and the planet was before them, dark clouds swirling across its day-side surface and the presence of a Master of Luke's art resonating like a frequency only he could hear.

Patra blinked, looked down at a readout and back up. "No cities, no spaceport..." He looked

at Luke inquiringly.

"This is where I need to be."

Patra nodded once and took the ship down. He showed previously unseen skills as a pilot

in jockeying through trees and fog below the turbulent atmosphere, and after a few dangerous

minutes the ship settled on swampy ground in the sector Luke indicated, that he remembered from

twice before.

Then everything was still, the lights dimmed and the ship crouching on its landing legs

like an enormous mechanical insect, and Luke unclipped his crash webbing and stood up.

Outside it was raining, fat drops of water coming down on the forwards view screen and

among the tangle of trees and vines and waterways around them.

Patra got up out of his webbing and crossed the room to palm the boarding ramp open. The

sounds of rain and movements of water increased in volume and reality, and Luke drew the smell

and sense of the place in and just remembered for a moment. And there were dark eyes glinting

in the dimness of the storm and a soft probing touch to Luke's mind.

He turned to Patra. "I'm sorry I can't give you anything for your help." he said. "I thank

you."

Patra nodded his long head once and took a step back into his ship. "You get where you're

going." He said then bowed with his wings spread and tilted forward and his arms crossed, top

set over bottom. "_Kailrea kronolee_," he intoned, and turned away.

Luke walked down the ramp and onto the patch of solid ground they had landed on, thick

forest on one side and a dark leaf-strewn lake on the other, and entered the darkness of the

gnarled trees. The_ Orion_ rose on the barely tangible energy of its repulsors, made a half turn

above their heads, and then its engine tubes flared blue and it was gone above the low, grey

cloud line. And Luke turned and spoke to what he knew was in the dim landscape there;

"Master," He called, "I've returned."


	6. Meanwhile

**Chapter 6: Meanwhile, back at the present...**

Corran Horn saw Master Skywalker disappear, melt away, flicker--Jado Krake's fist nearly slammed into the Jedi's face. Corran dodged and swiped the Remnant agent's feet out from under him as Krake move foreword for another punch and instead again collapsed. Corran's lightsaber flicked to Krake's throat.

"What is it?" Corran found himself growling. "What've you done to him?"

Krake's confidence had gone up; his objective of thinning the pair of Jedi to one had been a success. "He's gone. Rebellion era I think..." The agent chuckled.

Krake was taller than Corran when he struggled to his feet; Corran gathered the Force about him and peered into the man's eyes as if seeing into his mind--which of course he was. The slight intimidation made Krake remember he was a captive. And Corran asked again, softer, "What has that machine done to him?"

It was lying on the duracrete where Luke had stood. Corran called it to his hand and held it against his body, daring Krake to go after it again.

"It's a time machine," The agent sounded like he was boasting. "He's ten years younger now, heh heh!"

"Time travel technology was never developed by the Empire. It's impossible."

"Well where's the Jedi then?"

Corran ignored this question. "You're comin with me..." He pulled a pair of binders deftly from a belt pouch and clamped them around Krake's hands, then stuffed the machine back in his bag to keep his own hands free. "to your contact's ship."

Krake did not reply or resist. Corran pushed him ahead of himself off the beachfront, toward the spaceport.

**C**hakra Bek and his Pho Ph'eahian guide emerged into the light of Corellia's sun from her ship, and immediately the Twi'lek made for the bay's exit. Instead of leaving he paced there, black-laced lekku swaying with his movements.

The Pho Ph'eahian pilot moved around the side of the ship, keeping an eye on the Twi'lek. When he turned to exit the dock, she followed.

Chakra was only waiting for Jado Krake's delivery. When the agent appeared Chakra rushed to him, whispering confidentially; "Do you have it?"

Krake nodded and reached into his bag, a strangely morose expression on his face.

Krake hesitated, and Chakra felt a soft but strong touch around his hands. A twitch showed that Krake had felt it too, and then there was another man with them, someone Human wearing a pine green cloak.

"Good job Krake," He said with a trace of sarcasm, and quick as thought the newcomer had binders around both their wrists.

Chakra felt the vestigial claws at his fingers bare. "What is this?"

"This is justice." The cloaked man's green eyes looked Chakra up and down. "Chakra Bek, I presume. Unfortunately you're not going to get your package."

"What do you know about this?" The three turned to see the Pho Ph'eahian in the door to the docking bay, a tiny blaster in her lower right hand pointed at not the captives but their captor. With her other low hand she flipped a Republic badge from a pocket of her flightsuit. "Republic operative De'shar. You're all under arrest."

"Corran Horn." The cloaked man said. "Jedi Knight."

Having been trailed by this double agent De'shar from the beginning of the mission paled in comparison to involvement by the Jedi. Chakra tried to look innocent. "We're just traders. The Imperial Remnant is perfectly within legal boundaries--"

"Not when trading untested time machines." The Jedi, Horn, casually returned. "You're staying with us."

For a moment De'shar looked as confused as the Imperials had at first been. "Time machines? I've been trailing these two to find the line of artifact smuggling in and out of Corellia. They'll be taken to Coruscant and questioned there, Master Jedi."

Corran Horn held up the black faceted machine. "The Human used this to, he says, send my companion years back in time. I'd appreciate if you'd allow me to question them at the temple on Yavin 4..."

De'shar looked between the three, her dark gaze equally suspiciously lying on Chakra, Krake and Corran. "These men are enemies of the Republic. They should be tried as such."

"I don't believe they can be tried at all until we have all the information. The Jedi academy is the best place to get that information, do you agree?"

After another long look at all of them she nodded. "Give me the coordinates. I'll keep them in my ship."

Corran nodded. He couldn't put anyone in an X-Wing anyway, but was loathe to tell this Pho Ph'eahian that. For an independent agent, she was surprisingly authoritative, something he respected but disliked in a person who was, occupationally, his equal or inferior.

"Don't we get any say in this?" Chakra called, a bit of fear showing in his sickly yellow eyes.

"No." Corran and De'shar answered together.

De'shar began to take the Imperials away, covertly taking a supposedly hidden blaster from the Twi'lek with her third hand and waving Corran away with the fourth. "Comm me with the coordinates." She commanded, and disappeared around the curving wall of the docking bay.

Corran stared after them for a moment, then sighed at the strangeness of some beings and turned for his ship.


	7. Party Selection

_So maybe I didn't update that soon. No coming after me with lightsabers, please, it's here now! I'll get back to Luke in the next couple chapters and into some really good action after that-these little talk chapters are kinda annoying me to but they move it along. _

_"Move along." _

_Anyway..._

**Chapter 7: Party Selection**

The two X-wings and De'shar's ship descended into Yavin 4's atmosphere at the break of day as the Temple was waking. The Imperials were detained and interrogated without much trouble, and a meeting was called in what had once been a Rebel command center.

It was a Massassi-built room, brown rock etched with strange symbols along the base, around a modern, rectangular conference table. Those assembled were the senior jedi; Tionne, Kam Solusar, Streen, Cilghal and a few more. Corran stood at the front but did not sit. It felt empty to him without Luke Skywalker at the head of the table, and he tried to project the confidence and poise the master displayed.

"This is a time machine." The sphere sat on the table suspended in an energy field anchored by thin metal joists. Jado Krake had been unusually cooperative but had not told them how the device worked, so the machine had not been touched since its capture. There were murmurs of comments; "Time machine." "What sort of technology...?"

"This machine was being delivered to an old secret military installation in the Kessel system called Maw Installation. This station had housed the scientists who created the Sun Crusher and the Death Stars. It appears that what we have is a prototype-it was being delivered to Maw Installation for a final modification when we intercepted it. The inventor Leeondro K'Saavis now knows how to program it to pinpoint any time in history, and send a person there."

A clear voice called from across the room. "Master Horn. So where is Master Skywalker?"

"You mean when, Master Akola." Corran looked at the blue-skinned, spike-bedecked alien Jedi near the door. Behind him and outside, Corran could sense agent De'shar approaching. "The Galactic Civil War, most probably, though there is no real way to tell. Choosing the time on the machine isn't specific yet. What he programmed in was a general era, most probably that one but there is no real way to tell-unless we find Leeondro K'Saavis."

"Will a group be able to enter the installation?" Kam Solusar asked.

Corran sighed. "We don't know. The installation isn't even supposed to be operational." After a pause in which De'shar entered and stood near the door he continued. "I propose we send a few Jedi, two or three, to see if we can peacefully approach the station to retrieve Master Skywalker and control or eliminate the production of these machines."

There was general agreement.

"Excuse me Master Jedi." De'shar said. "but this can be taken care of by the Republic authorities. You do not need to be concerned with it."

For a moment Corran was surprised. "Um, ma'am the mission of retrieving the machine was given the Jedi; I expect the follow-up would be ours also?"

The Pho Ph'eahian scowled, and Corran could not be sure if it was concealed threat in her smooth voice. "I realize that in the absence of your leader, Master Horn, you wish to assume responsibility for the Jedi, but there must be another party to the mission. I will mediate for the Republic."

She looked defiant, her arms crossed, and mostly everyone was looking at her now. Corran wasn't sure what she meant. "You wish to accompany the team to the Maw?"

"It is required, and I am willing to sacrifice the time. Assemble your team, Master Jedi. I will be at my ship."

"I don't know if she doesn't trust us or there really is some rule and she has to go...don't you think it is a bit strange though?"

"Maybe she's suicidal."

The serious and senatorial attitude of the meeting was gone, and Corran was bringing his packed bags through the temple hanger beside one of the members of the new team, alien Jedi Knight Kell. Her species was like a thinner, tailed mold of the Trandoshans, their heads impressively toothed and orange-scaled. Thin antennae, gill slits at their cheeks and thick plated backs and forearms attested to an origin more crustacean than the immediately obvious reptilian. When Kell spoke, the words hissed out from the gill slits, her muzzle not moving at all except in an occasional predatory smile.

"And maybe this is going to be a simple mission and this K'Saavis fellow is going to hand us his time machine on a platter." Corran continued sarcastically.

"Maybe we'll be able to stop on a planet where this thing can get a paint job." The third Jedi member of the group, near-human Sidi Driss, swung himself in an easy backflip off the roof of De'shar's ship. "Really needs a little style, you know?"

"Quit jokin' around, Driss." Kell admonished. "Everything ready?"

Sidi saluted Kell smartly. "As ready as it's gonna be with this hunk of Jawa scrounge."

Kell grinned ruefully. Sidi Driss was the academy's resident expert mechanic. He was found as a parts monger on Tatooine at the age of fifteen. Now he was a twenty-something Jedi in training, a half human, his alien ancestry attested to by long, high cheekbones that seemed to peak in dull spikes below his ears and a dark blue stripe across the bridge of his nose. He was known to be level-headed and clever, but usually hid these qualities under a joking and frivolous attitude.

De'shar appeared from inside the ship, glancing suspiciously at Sidi. Then her question was aimed at Corran, and she payed the others no attention."You all ready?"

The various answers were in the affirmative, Corran's concise, Kell's a nod, and Sidi's slightly sarcastic. De'shar treated them indifferently. "Very well then. We shall head off?" She stood in the main hatchway, as if impatient.

So they entered and were off, and into the dark closeness of the cockpit and hyperspace each took to their own.

_Now, dear reader, do to some chapter editing on my part thou must go to the chapter entitled Agent Training, and then back to what is called eight. _


	8. The Calm

**Chapter 9: The Calm**

Far away, Luke Skywalker had stood beneath the dripping canopy of trees on Dagobah, and slitted yellow-green eyes peered into his blue ones.

"Returned?" Yoda's voice was rough and quizzical. "Know you I do not. Who are you?"

Luke thought back, and of course Yoda would not know him. In this world the young Jedi he had been had not survived the battle of Yavin-therefore never encountering Yoda a few years later.

"I'm Luke Skywalker," He said. "Jedi Knight. You knew me, once...in another time. Another world."

"Hmm." Yoda moved out into the clearing, leaning on his gnarled stick."Yes...seen this I have. There is a disturbance with you, young Luke, and change things must we. Come with me; much speaking we have to do."

Now Luke was back to Yoda's home in the swamps and crouched there like he had before, his head brushing the ceiling. Yoda moved about slowly, carefully, then came to stand before the human, their eyes level.

"Seen this alternate world I have. "Yoda said after a time. "May be our true path it is. But what do you wish of me?"

"I need to get back!" Luke said, and the frustration that came out in his voice surprised himself. In the last few days his Jedi peace had been tried-but he let the Force flow around him, and the demeanor he employed at the academy returned. "There was a machine, a device..I must need one. I thought you might have an answer. And this is the only safe place for a Jedi.

"Hmm." Yoda nodded. "Return you to your world I can not. Help you here, I can. Protected we are."

"Here. But I don't want to be here! I want to go home!"

"Restless you are."

"Oh..." Luke knelt beside Yoda. "No, no I just...don't know what's going on." He sighed.and absently scanned the cavelike house, but there was no answer found there."I'm sorry, Master."

Yoda shook his head and moved away from Luke, seeming distracted with the surroundings. "Your Master I am not! Far past calling me Master you are." The fierce mein changed, Yoda again evenly spoke, calm. "Stay here you will, until outside you are forgotten. Wait we will."

"But what about the Force?" Luke asked. "Can you feel there's something wrong with, the whole galaxy? Did I bring that?"

"Have your answers I do not. In such a state the Force has been for many years. Maybe we will discover these things soon. But not now."

"Thank you." Luke said. So there were no answers here. It was easier to trust in the Force and the future here than in hostile territory. He left the house and took to the swamp and wild land, a smile occasionally hovering around his features.


	9. Dread

**Chapter 10: Dread**

two days later

In the space above the globe of Dagobah, a Star Destroyer blocked out the silver spangles of the stars, and the Force reverberated through the mind of Darth Vader.

"He is here."

The woman beside Vader shifted her awareness the slightest bit, her emerald eyes never flicking from the starscape before her to the Sith at her side.

"Jade." Vader rumbled. "You will capture the Jedi and bring him to me alive."

"Yes, master."

The vornskr attached to the lead in her hand strained forwards as if it too could perceive the hunt before it, barbed tail lashing against its black flank.

When Luke returned to Yoda's home from a run the alien Jedi was standing outside leaning on his stick, and Luke knew that danger of the approaching ships weighed on Yoda's mind as on his own.

"The Empire's found me." he said, breath catching in his throat from the urgent speed of the last klick of the run.

Yoda was imperturbably calm. "Go. To the cave of the dark side."There was a fierceness in the yellow eyes. "Only Yoda will they find."

Luke was going to protest. The whine of a TIE fighter cut through the murky air, then the hiss and rumble of a larger ship, and one high howl.

Vornskrs. And a company of stormtroopers and dark Jedi.

"Take care of these I will." Yoda said. "You, they must not see."

"Yes Master." Was all Luke said, and trusted to the Force to convey the gratitude he felt. He took to the wilderness of swamps, with the baying, howling vornskrs able to be sensed as patches of hunger

and intensity.

Mara Jade moved through the swamp with Force-acuted senses, her vornskr--the leader and controller of the pack baying before them--strained at its wire lead. Darth Vader himself paced a bit behind her, seeming to always find the high ground, never marring the black shine of his dark armor.

The main force of the vornskr pack was ahead and howling for midi-chlorian-laced blood. Those loose animals were the ones the ships and ground trackers would follow; Vader, Mara and the alpha vornskr

followed their own, more exact path.

When they entered the clearing, the object of the search stood before his crude home, a tiny figure among the greater green murk.

"Master Yoda," Vader began. "You must have known we would find you someday." The alien did not react. "Mara."

She looked up as Vader began to pace along the dry ground toward Yoda.

"Follow the apprentice." Vader commanded, and Mara turned to reenter the forest. A branch fell from the canopy into her path, a crashing thick grey-skinned bole, and she leaped smoothly out of its way. The vornskr, with fleet but inferior reflexes, lashed against the leash in pain as it drug one foreleg from beneath the branch. Mara turned angrily around it and the ground itself plumed up like a soundless explosion, rocks and dust stinging her face and eyes. She stepped back the opposite way, toward Yoda, but Vader stopped her with a gesture.

The dark lord approached the tiny Jedi himself. The look in Yoda's eyes toward her though, for just a moment, told Mara that if she tried to move the response would be lethal. The vornskr bent to inspect its leg, broad shoulders flexing and back legs pacing in place with the excitement of the proximity of the powers around it. Yoda's gaze moved to Vader.

"Between you and I this is."

"So be it." The dark lord rumbled, and ignited his lightsaber. The humming blade swept toward Yoda, and the alien seemed to block and hold the red saber with his bare hands, a feat of control over energy and the Force.

Vader pulled back and struck again and Yoda caught it again. The air seemed full of the Force and Yoda's mastery of it, his intent to trap them here, to bring the forest down, so that his apprentice, the last of the Jedi, would not be found.

A tree uprooted before Mara and fell with a crash between her and the combatants. The alpha vornskr howled.

Luke moved through the darkening forest-swampland with speed borne of neccessity and familiarity. When he paused at the peak of an arching root over a still, dark pool the cave was about half a klick ahead sending out tendrils of darkness into the thoughts, and the trackers of the Empire the same distance behind. He knew Yoda was fighting; the Force rang with it.

Also, it rang with the presense of Darth Vader. Luke did not bother thinking about Darth Vader now. There was no use. Their bond, by blood and conflict, was weaker now than it had been after the revelation on Cloud City; possibly Darth Vader himself did not know that the man his forces were hunting was his son.

And for the same strange reason of seeming anachronisms, Yoda would soon die. Probably by Vader's hand.

During his short rest the forerunners of the hunters, the loose vornskr pack, had drawn closer. There was a stirring in the middle distance.

Luke jumped across the pool as the first vornskr appeared, quicker than he'd thought. They could still easily be lost, for they ran best on open ground.

Something burst out of the water--someone, someone who, when they rushed for him, drew a green-yellow lightsaber and threw the fight to the vornskrs. The first one to lunge was caught on the emerald tip of the saber and flung back into its fellows. The second was kicked in the head while the lightsaber attended to a third. Neither returned after the first attack.

In the time it took for Luke to begin to cross the bridgeway of roots the mysterious saber-wielder had finished. Ignoring the vornskrs' black bodies in a circle around him he stepped out of that circle and began to wade across to Luke, who dropped back to the land to wait.

The newcomer was Jedi, the flickering Force told Luke. His species appeared to be Nautolan, with the black-tipped tentacles that had lashed and waved during the short fight now dangling around his head and shoulders like hair. His skin was bright green, his eyes wide and black. He wore a white sleeveless shirt and long pants beneath a brown robe, and it was all worn, tattered, and soaking wet.

He stood before Luke for a moment just breathing heavily and looking around. There was the roar of a ship overhead and Luke looked up then back at the Nautolan. "We better get outta here." He said.

Without a word the Nautolan followed him into the deeper wilderness nearer the caves. When they could no longer hear their pursuers--the human trackers had rose their own calls when the bodies

of the vornskrs were discovered-the Nautolan spoke.

"Where is this place?"

"Dagobah. Where'd you come from?"

A white film flicked across the Nautolan's eyes from left to right than back. "I was on Coruscant. The clone troopers had those Jedi-hunter beasts. We were being wiped out. I thought I had been knocked out...or it was just a bad dream." Luke couldn't read emotion in the alien face, but the voice and sense became more angry and less confused. "And who are you?"

The ships were drawing near again, the TIE fighters circling around something else that sounded familiar...if only he had the time to sense the pilot. His thoughts were busy with their enemies. "Luke Skywalker."

"Kit Fisto."

There was an upheaval in the Force. Luke threw himself into the low cave entrance as the first of the TIE fighters crashed flaming into the canopy and fell a few meters away in a tangle of twisted wing struts. The Nautolan saw where Luke had gone and slid down after him, abandoning the instinctual safety of a Force shield for the more stable dark cave.

Another TIE crashed into the distance, and the whine-burp of ship's lasers echoed through the sky.

Suddenly Luke knew what familiar ship that was; it curved by overhead then flipped on its thin side and came back toward them, showing the distinct profile of a Corellian YT-1300.

The _Millenium Falcon_.

Firing a few warning shots into the trees where the trackers hesitantly waited, the modified freighter drifted onto repulsor power in front of the cave. The ramp lowered and Han Solo appeared, a blaster in his right hand cocked toward the swamp.

Luke whispered for the Nautolan to follow him and pulled himsel fout of the cave mouth. Quickly they crossed the thin spot of open ground between them without movement from the trackers. Han Solo muttered hello and glanced suspiciously at Kit Fisto but sealed the hatch when they were inside without question and made for the cockpit. A few seconds later they were headed for the atmosphere with ineffectual blaster bolts from the trackers pattering the _Falcon_'s stable shields.


	10. The Storm

_Note: I wrote this before Episode III so discrepancies in that timeline are entirely the fault of my imagination and do not do to much to effect the story. _

**Chapter 11: The Storm**

Up in space there was chaos. A Star Destroyer floated serenely above and to the right of the _Falcon_ and had discharged at least a few squadrons of TIE fighters and a Skipray Blastboat, and they all angled to swarm the _Falcon_ like hungry mynocks. Casually, Han flipped the ship around and made for the space beyond the curve of Dagobah. Lasers splashed against the aft shields.

"Set the coordinates, Chewie." Han muttered, and the Wookie grumbled and moved his furry hands across the controls.

"How'd you find us?" Luke asked.

" I owed Paqs Patra a rescue. He said you were a friend of his."

On cue the _Orion_ appeared overhead and a comm click gave Han some signal to curve out toward deep space. The TIEs were fading behind, victims of range and the greater speed of their prey. But now the Star Destroyer was turning toward them, and it was a race to see whether its turbolaser banks would come into range or the rebel ships would be released from the gravity shadow of Dagobah first .

"We're gonna make it." Han muttered. Chewie growled something, and Han cursed and turned the ship around.

The reason was evident as the _Orion_ rotated into view. One of the two engine tubes was no longer spilling efflux, and wounded as it was the TIEs were surrounding it.

"Get to the guns, kids." Han commanded.

Luke got up to make for the dorsal laser turret, but Kit did not move. For the entire flight the Nautolan had been silent, staring into space with his wide black eyes.

"Don't go after him." Kit said.

Luke glanced at him. "What?"

"You don't sense it? He draws us into a trap."

The _Orion_ was rotating slowly, occasional laser bursts coming from it, many more pouring in. Luke hadn't concentrated on Patra; he had been simply trusting him. Certainly Kit would have noticed any falsity from Patra first as there was no friendly label on him in the Nautolan's mind.

Han, as usual, made his own decision completely disregarding the Force-users in his company. "Space it. We're going back." The _Falcon_ turned around, Han's manual foreword lasers flying out at the Imperials now turning for them while harassing Patra's wounded craft.

Luke went to the dorsal turret, as much to support Han as for the view. The Nautolan, he noted, did not move to follow. Luke still could not detect, with any senses, deception from Patra. Fear and anger; no deception.

In the swiveling laser turret Luke fell into the rhythm of picking off TIEs as they arched, in predictable attack patterns, over the _Falcon_ spitting lasers. As the Skipray Blastboat, a large two-winged ship arming ion cannon and proton torpedoes, came toward them the Falcon went into corkscrewing evasive maneuver paths, making it harder for the TIEs to follow and for Luke to shoot them.

"Watch that Star Destroyer." Luke commed. The big ship was getting close--not close enough to use a tractor beam, but close--and the other Imps were obviously trying to stall them around the _Orion_ until it arrived.

"Trust me, I'm watching it." Han grumbled, then could be dimly heard clicking through comm channels looking for Patra's. Luke took out another TIE. A proximity alarm flashed--the Destroyer entering tractor range.

"Han!"

An explosion filled most of Luke's viewport with white and orange and red light. The laser turret shook around him, and Han immediately turned the _Falcon_ away from the Star Destroyer and broke for open space. A single curse came over the comm. There was no sense of loss of Patra, but it was too late to see what the explosion had been if not him, and Luke didn't trust the Force anymore, not in the state it was.

It struck him as a strange thought, that such a thing as that should cross his mind.

In the next moment the _Falcon_ jumped into hyperspace, and all was stars and quiet.

When Luke went into the cockpit Han was looking suspiciously at the Nautolan Jedi. Chewbacca was running diagnostics at his console, his alien sense wary.

"I do not understand a lot." Kit was saying. "I know we are fighting an enemy, and the Jedi are gone, correct?"

Han looked more suspicious. "An enemy. That would be the Empire..." He was visibly wondering why Kit did not know about it.

"Empire." The Nautolan repeated, brooding on the concept.

Han swung around in his chair when Luke entered the cockpit and sat down. "And do I know you from somewhere? This barve must've got hit on the head too hard and doesn't know where he is. You– " and suddenly he pulled his blaster and propped it on the chair arm pointing at Luke. "Luke? You should be dead." He glared.

Momentary panic fled before cold calm. Luke raised his hands a little. "I suppose I should but strange things have happened. I came here from another universe–Patra trusts me." He could sense's Han's deep wariness and subtly smoothed his mind, using cracks the pirate did not, at this point, even know where there in his mental armor.

Han took some time to think about that. He peered at Luke as if to make sure of his reality. "Makes more sense then you surviving Yavin, I guess. But I've heard a lot of weird things in this galaxy, and that's got to be the weirdest." He turned back to the console, seemingly to double check his copilot. He shuddered inside, keeping his face sabacc-blank. Luke felt immediately sorry for him.

"You're from the Old Republic, aren't you." Luke said to Kit then. It was a sudden suspicion. "What was happening when you came here?"

"The Jedi Council was disbanded. Senator Palpatine declared himself an emperor and the Jedi traitors. We were being hunted down."

Luke nodded. "The Jedi purge. This is the aftermath of that. Those ships were from Palpatine's Empire. When I was here I was part of a rebellion against them."

The Nautolan's head-tails quivered, maybe a sign of confusion. If he had been going to say something, Han interrupted.

"Wait. Where are you from?"

"The future." Luke said. "No, the present, but an alternate present where ten years ago the rebels defeated the Empire."

"The Empire is evil." Kit said. "If it is, was, can be defeated I would be honored to aid in it. For my world. For your fallen friend."

"Well I'm sure we'll need you. I mean if I can even find the Rebellion." But Luke's spirits were rising, here safe with allies.

"We will." Han muttered.

"You'll help?"

"Sure. To make the place more interesting."

Finally, Mara saw Darth Vader step out of the ruins of Yoda's home. The sounds of his lightsaber and crashing around them had stopped, abruptly, a minute or so ago, replaced by rasping breathing. Yoda's death had been just a surge in the Force, and maybe a sense of peace that had passed over Mara without touching her.

Vader dropped from the gigantic trunk of a fallen tree to the ground next to Mara.

"The mission is complete." The Sith's deep voice intoned. He began to walk across the furrowed ground toward their shuttle. Mara followed, the vornskr limping behind them.

"There is but one Jedi left." Vader continued. "And he will be ours. The Emperor will make sure of it."


	11. Maw Installation

**Chapter 12: Maw Installation**

There were beacons, subspace mini-frequency transmitters, tracing a path through the black hole cluster that was the Maw.

De'shar's silver craft moved through the swirling gases around the black holes. White marker lights, held just outside event horizons, flared to life as it approached, casting no shadow against the crisp white lines of the ship bathed by light from gases circling the holes.

Inside, De'shar sat at a side console employing the sophisticated equipment needed to find the Imperial beacons usually keyed to certain ships. Sidi Driss was at the yoke and Kell at the lasers, just in case. Corran stood looking out into the color storms, trying for a glimpse at the calm supposedly inside.

Just as there was, maybe, a normal space ahead De'shar motioned for Corran to come over. She pointed to a resolving holoimage of a cluster of asteroids, poised like gravitational high-wire walkers in the center of the cluster. "That's it."

Corran nodded, and looked back ahead. Round and ovoid shapes were in view now as the ship slid from the black hole cluster; spherical buildings and a few asteroids connected by durasteel and transparisteel tunnelways.

Predictably, as Corran turned to the main console the comm toned with a message from the station.

Corran signaled for Sidi to stop their approach and keyed the comm.

"Come in unidentified craft." The voice was filtered and mechanical.

Corran immediately leaned over the console and spoke. "This is Corran Horn of the _Pheahia_. We are representatives of the New Republic. We have an appointment with Leeondro K'saavis about an item of new technology."

There was silence on the other end for a time. Corran held his breath. If K'saavis did not let them in under the guise of rebel Republic agents seeking to find Imperial Remnant technology, they would have to get information on the time machine forcibly-something none of the Jedi wanted to do.

They got permission to dock at an external port of the station and disembarked, leaving Sidi to keep watch on the ship. Inside it was new looking, white halls with strange greenish lighting. A male Twi'lek with indigo lekku hanging down next to his white face met them at the hatchway.

"Corran Horn."

Corran extended a hand to the Twi'lek, but it was ignored. Kell and De'shar had formed up behind him like bodyguards, Kell obviously Jedi with her lightsaber unhidden. De'shar and Corran were dressed in unassuming spacer's jumpsuits.

"I will take you to Lee K'Saavis." The Twi'lek said, and turned and began to walk. The Jedi's team followed.

Across a clear tunnel and into a larger, dark stone structure, the Twi'lek was silent, but as they went deeper in he spoke very quietly to Corran. "No Rebels come to see K'Saavis." The orangish eyes glittered. "If you are not who you say you are he will know."

Corran said nothing. There was slight apprehension about meeting this mysterious inventor, but it was pushed away, in the tradition of the Jedi.

Eventually they came to a white, unremarkable door, and the Twi'lek stepped aside and indicated they should go in.

Behind the door was another door, and two hulking Whiphid bodyguards, dressed in light battle armor over their bristly brown fur. One, him on the right now, was clearly a neutral-dark Force-user, and Kell acted appropriately wary.

The Whiphids passed scanners over them, searching for hidden weaponry, and finding none, had them leave blasters and lightsaber here between the two doors. This was fine with Corran; he had no plans to attack, and a Jedi was never truly defenseless. He felt the one Whiphid's mind passing over his own and could easily hide his Jedi nature from it.

The second door opened onto a large office. It was plain, typical of any manager or bureaucrat, save the dark carbonite-frozen body against the near wall. Within the metal was a Nautolan, head-tails splayed around its head like the curving rays of a stylized sun. Corran turned his eyes away. Leeondro K'Saavis himself sat behind a large white desk holding a glowrod, datapad and a few flimsiplast printouts. He was an older man, with black disheveled hair in a short ponytail. His face was lined and unbeautiful, as if the skin had been reconstructed a few times. His eyes were lively and blue, and he wore a red, outdated uniform under a white lab coat.

Corran gave a curt bow. "Good day, Mr. K'Saavis."

"You also, Corran Horn." His voice was warm and accented slightly, like that of a Coruscanti senator.

It was an opening that obviously gave no revelation or quarter. Corran began his rehearsed speech. "It came to the attention of the Republic that there was developing technology moving in and out of this station. We intercepted something that seriously injured a military commander. We request information about this object."

"Which technology would that be? There are many things shipped from here to Imperial space, perfectly legally, of course."

"Shipped?" De'shar immediately sputtered. "More like smuggled. Your agents had clear intention to use the technology against the investigating official. Under Republic law this is considered assailing."

During this utterly unplanned speech Corran had been readying a hand-held holo-projector. Now he activated it and a rotating image of the louvered machine captured at Master Skywalker's disappearance resolved.

Leeondro K'Saavis seemed completely imperturbed by De'shar's accusations. He came from behind the desk and looked at the machine. He passed his hands over it once, almost a caress.

"Yes, I know this one. A great machine."

"What does it do?"

There was a shrewd gleam in K'Saavis's bright eyes. "It is a time machine. I sent it to Imperial space because the modifications that were to be made were to great to work here. Had I gotten that machine back I could have set it to open an access to any time. I of course have another copy being prepared, but had not there been this unfortunate accident..."

"It was not an accident." Corran said. "The Jedi team was tracking the aforementioned smuggling. Your agent set the thing for ten years ago and activated it in my colleague's hands. Who knows where he is now. We need him back."

K'Saavis nodded, mixed sincerity and malevolence. "This one you lost was a Jedi, correct, as you are?"

"Yes." Corran said, catching himself far to late. "He is Jedi."

K'Saavis's smile slipped onto his face like a thief at a heist, a sliver of white teeth. "This has been a security misstep unworthy of the Imperial network. But at least there is one less Jedi in the universe."

The door behind them opened and the Whiphids lumbered in with the white Twi'lek and two armored humans behind them, all holding heavy blasters.

De'shar bristled; literally her ears and fur standing on end. Kell looked coolly at the Whiphids, Corran at K'Saavis, the inventor at them all with that disconcerting smile.


	12. Patra and the Empire

**Chapter 13: Patra and the Empire**

As the descending turbolift shivered beneath splayed, clawed feet, Paqs Patra felt more alone than they had ever been.

A person of his species could never be alone, the part of Paqs residing in the beaked reptilian head noted. But he had never noticed how the stationary symbiote on his back that aliens tended to see as golden wings did not much count as a companion when one was facing imminent danger.

The part of their brain that was housed in the small, winged body was thinking back to the events that lead up to now, because that was what he did. His was the rational side of the twin being they were. The larger body, lacking in decisions it could contribute to, listened.

Paqs's people were intelligent, adept at taking many walks of life, and rare. The Empire had found Paqs themselves as a small-time smuggler and forcibly recruited them as an information gatherer. The price of possible failure-their home planet. And now there had been a failure. They had been supposed to capture that man they had taken to the swampy planet, just as he and Paqs's old ally Han Solo left that planet, by faking Paqs's own peril. But for some reason, coincidence or Han's distrustful nature or some skill of the Jedi, it had failed.

So Paqs was on Had Abbadon, capital of the true forces behind the Empire, to see Darth Vader about the results of that failure.

Paqs cleared away these thoughts as they finally stepped out of the turbolift. The walls of the narrow hallway there were a dark brown rock, cool and lit by glowrods in wall sconces. The only room on this level was small, but seemed a galaxarium. Holo images made it seem that the place, many klicks underground, was at the planet's surface. An insectoid surveillance ship cruised over plains and spires of rust and black rock landscape, and the sun set behind the half-framework diamond of a dry-docked Super Star Destroyer.

Darth Vader moved from a side, that rumbling breathing seeming terribly loud. Paqs had met Vader before, but they had not been in nearly so much trouble. It made his skin prickle and his small, intelligent self tuck his wings next to their body.

"I have a new assignment for you, Patra."

Paqs relaxed only slightly. "Thank you, lord Vader."

"However, the terms of our agreement seem to have altered. Those Rebels were very important to me. The Death Star's next target will be your own world."

Paqs staggered, then tried to look into the flicker of red light on metal that might have been Vader's eyes. "But lord Vader, we made no mistake! It was the Rebels, the Jedi, no desertion on our part--"

"And yet the point will be made. You will report to Commander Horn aboard the Bitter Heart for reeducation, do you understand this?"

"Of course, lord Vader." Patra said and, after Vader swept out on some other indisputable errand, stood in that room a moment more, a sour pit of fear, anger and deep sadness brewing in his hearts.


	13. Event Horizon

**Chapter 14: Event Horizon **

Something like a message cylinder, a maybe meter-long tube with one blinking light and a tiny rocket engine, cruised out of the color of the Maw. Sidi Driss slid from his station in the ship clamped beneath Maw Installation to Kell's gunner's position, watching the blinking beacon. It was a respite from boredom for Sidi; there had been stillness outside the ship and in the back of his head where Sidi shakily sensed Master Kell and Master Horn through the Force, since the rest of the team had left.

Sidi quickly got a sensor mark on the little thing and watched as its trajectory became a simple drop into a small bay on the side of one of the larger asteroids. Just a message cylinder, Sidi thought with some disappointment, though that was all he had expected it to be.

From where Master Kell was came a flash of excitement, a calling through the Force loud and unspecified as if she was afraid he would not hear it. Immediately Sidi made for the top hatch. Suddenly something shook the ship hard, then a laser beam sounded fore and the young Jedi dashed back to the cockpit.

The ships outside, gray metal shapes that flashed by splashing lasers, were of a model that Sidi had never seen before, probably most like a Hornet Interceptor. The body was sleek and long and ridged with metal, the cockpit two bulbous eyes with lasers above and below. The wings were flat with miniature versions of a TIE fighter's wing plates vertical at each of the four tips, and became two separate parts about half a meter from the body. The sound was like a lightsaber drone with a laser-whine to it, or reminiscent of an insect.

Sidi immediately dropped into the pilot seat, cursing himself for not familiarizing himself with the single-crew controls during hyperspace. He punched in the startup sequence while trying to bring the manual controls up on the display screen. Another insectoid ship flashed past, and from the sound sliced at the hull plates, until the shields came up strong and it veered away.

Sidi eased De'shar's _Pheahia_ away from the docking node though keeping his back to the station-those little ships were much faster than De'shar's-and simultaneously hit a button for a wide-band distress signal, switched a switch to arm the guns, and cast about in the Force.

His horizons widened. There were five of the little ships, pilots with clear, sharp intent to kill, the black holes at the edge of perception pulling on them all.

Sidi waited a moment as they waited for him, then two flashed past in a showy maneuver of one coming from the left and another from the right.. The _Pheahia's _laser swivelled and spurt and the right ship took a hit and sparked, then the Force pushed them together. Metal collided and screamed, shields sprayed electric flak. The ships exploded in red fire and Sidi grinned behind the darkening viewport.

The three remaining seemed to learn from that. They stayed at a distance and shot at him, steadily weakening his shields. He knew that his ship had not half their capabilities, but he had the Force! _Don't get cocky, _he could hear Master Kell say. _Bravado is a talent of the lesser animals. _

Sidi moved the ship out just slightly and sprayed lasers around to make the three move. No word from his team's commlink, though they must have gotten the signal.

The foe were good, but as Sidi returned to the gunner's position and fell into the Force it could be seen that they were matched well. The little ships came no closer and Sidi's shields held, but he knew that all to soon one of those ships would grow brave and come into range, and the shields wouldn't take it. He almost considered retreating, running, but the other members of the team needed him to defend their ship now.

_It's moving to there-_his lasers took out the closest of the three. He turned for a shot and another one, a clear blip in the Force, when something rocked the ship and a blue light reflected off the edges of the viewport. An alarm, he didn't know at first what it meant, blared. The second ship was behind him, the first had darted out of his sights. He tried to turn after it and found that he was caught in a tractor beam.

Sidi cursed, had a moment of sitting there restraining anger, then turned the Force on the tractor's source, the bug ship behind him. It was turning and therefore turning Sidi's ship, like they were dancing. It could now be seen that the tractor beam emanated from near the ship's "eyes." There was no visible exact place the beam came from. What sort of organization had the technology to mount a strong tractor beam on a ship the size of a snubfighter? It tantalized the part of Sidi's mind that enjoyed technical details.

But with the sight of mute, swirling color his thoughts changed from wonderment to fear, a quick fear of a death both slow and instant, unknown and ancient--

The tiny ship and its tractor beam were going to move him into the gravity well, the point of no return, of the nearest black hole, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Sidi took a deep breath of the stale air, sat perfectly still though his body was tensing more with each imagined millimeter, and reached out with his mind to the bug's pilot. There was the lifelessness of vacuum, there the being of the pilot, thankfully malleable and human. He whispered as he thought the words; _you want to release me. You want to leave, just to go to someplace safe.._. A laser scream, and Sidi was thrown foreword. The other ship...!

He knew when the point of no return was passed; he knew it with the innate connection his kind had with the universe since birth. It filled him with a longing for life, for the open air, for a future imagined with Kell as his Master and him traveling the galaxy and seeing wonders. The tractor beam faded. Sidi waited until his tears began to stretch into long strips like sparkling pools, and then the Force destroyed and filled him.


	14. Event

**Chapter 15: Event**

The death of Sidi Driss woke Corran Horn out of some kind of trance. Outside the wall sized viewport before him three ships in formation skimmed pastel colors circling featureless pits, round mouths, tunnels like a giant creature's slippery throat..!

Something cool and hard pressed against Corran's forehead and pricked the skin. "You killed him!" Corran found himself screaming and realized he could not move. The pale Twi'lek stepped away from the blue containment field Corran was suspended in, a blinking disk-shape in one hand.

"I didn't kill anyone." He said, incredibly calmly. He crossed the room and pushed the disk into a computer console. The walls were slightly curving in this room, to meet the concave row of windows. The containment field faced the windows, and the computer console and a small door were set into the right wall. Corran's thoughts felt fuzzy. There must have been something gone off, some kind of grenade or the like--the quality of technology here could not be underestimated. He tested the bonds of the containment field and found it predictably strong in both the electrical and mechanical components. If you cut the electricity here, he thought not without bitterness, it would be helpless. And where are Kell and De'shar?

Leeondro K'Saavis entered with his Whiphid guard and Corran struggled against the field, his green eyes glaring. "You can't keep us here. There's family, allies, all Jedi, who know exactly where we were going."

"And won't expect you back for days." The inventor smoothly said without turning from the computer he was now facing. "I hear traffic can be terrible around the black hole cluster lately." He cackled at his own sarcasm. He turned then and Corran saw that he had been working on a machine like the one Corran and De'shar had captured; the blackish louvered shape was unmistakable.

K'Saavis pressed a button that had not been on the captured machine, and the computer screen behind him showed the wide windows before Corran on one half and a radar-like sweep reader on the other.

The machine had a tail, Corran noticed, a cord trailing off the back ending in a thin antennae or spike.

"The original version of this wonderful technology," K'Saavis began saying, and Corran listened because he wanted to know. "could not put someone in a specified time. Now it can be set to do that as well as track where the time traveler is going. But I didn't even know it worked until your friend left. Thank you."

"Luke Skywalker was not a test subject for your inventions!"

K'Saavis started. "Skywalker? Hm, well he's gone now it doesn't matter." But clearly he had been unsettled, and Corran vowed to remember that.

"You, however, are a wonderful test subject." He continued, and set the machine at the base of the containment field. The two Whiphids had taken up positions to either side of him.

K'Saavis clicked the containment field off. Corran fell, pain shooting through his legs from the suspension. With Jedi quickness the Whiphids moved in in case of any trouble but there was no need--the machine was rushing up at him and he had to catch himself on the base or fall onto the sharp white tucks of the Whiphids. He knew what would happen when his hands brushed the sphere; he saw Luke again holding the thing and pushing him away. Corran yelled wordlessly but some control had already been activated, K'Saavis was smiling. A quick, cool and mundane touch and the machine dropped away from his splayed hands as he dissolved.


	15. En Route to the Lando System

**Chapter 16: En Route to the Lando System**

As the _Millennium Falcon_ slid through hyperspace, Kit Fisto faced down a tiny remote with his lime-colored lightsaber thrumming before his deep black eyes. Every few seconds when the remote spat a laser his stance would change, dozens of head-tails flex, and the lightsaber flawlessly catch the tiny beam. Luke sat sleepily behind the dejarik table watching him. Hyperspace lag was catching up with Luke; he felt like he needed to sleep but there was far too much to think about.

Han Solo came by and sat with his hands around a cup of caf, scowling at Kit.

"Something happened when I got here." Luke said quietly. "It changed something."

Kit's lightsaber retracted, a staticky, signature sound. "The Force is very strange here."

"You keep saying it's strange, but reality looks perfectly normal to me." Han said.

"But you can't feel the Force." Kit said.

"You don't think people appearing from other universes is unusual?" Luke asked. "From other times?"

"Well I don't know if I believe any of this." Han growled.

"It's right in front of you!"

"Hmm." Han said, and took a drink, wincing at the heat.

"Thanks for coming, anyway." Luke sighed. This conversation was beginning to feel like an old argument

"I came when Patra talked about you. I'm not chasing any galactic weirdness, I don't care that much. I was just coming back for a friend." He began to get up.

"Wait." Luke said. A revelation, a realization, had come over him. Han had been at Yavin 4; he had shot TIE fighters off the rebel's backs before Luke destroyed the Death Star.

"You didn't come back to the Yavin base, did you?" Luke said in his calm voice. Han stopped at the corridor to the cockpit. "That changed the universe! That must be the event that made all this."

"I know that!" Han yelled, and stormed out of sight.

Luke sat down, rather stunned, Kit's unblinking eyes stared vividly.

"Apparently he does not take the weight of the universe very well."

"Neither would I! Poor Han...I don't blame him for it, I'm just trying to figure things out. And who knows what's happening at home!" Strange to think of a whole lost universe as 'home'. There could be no smoke rising from an entire universe! No billions and billions of charred skeletons.

Luke pulled himself out of the past, a past that seemed so much nearer here where an era had never come to an end. He gathered the light side of the Force and slowly released it, then looked at Kit.

"This is a strange future." The Nautolan said, laughing. "Like a holodrama more than the life of a Jedi!"

They talked about the past and alternate present for a time. Luke was fascinated by the descriptions of the Old Republic, the armies of Jedi Masters and Knights on worlds with strange names like Geonosis and Korriban, cloned armies and Force-sensitive 'droids, all destroyed by the New Order in a Purge that Kit had been fleeing when something had happened to land him in the path of a vornskr hunting party. Kit listened raptly to what Luke thought of as a poor retelling of the Rebellion's history and the attack on the Death Star, but there there was a divergence in the reality of it so he wasn't sure what to say any more. Kit grew quiet, thinking about his home.

Luke went into the cockpit and sat behind Han and Chewbacca. "So where are we going?"

"To see an old friend." Han said quietly. "He 'll probably know where your Rebellion is."

"Lando?"

Han turned around.

"I met him in my world. I'm sorry, if you don't want to talk about that. I didn't mean to blame you."

"No, it's okay. Just...yeah. Let me think."

Luke turned to leave.

"Wait. I might as well ask...what happens to me?"

Luke hesitated, but figured that there would be no harm in telling. "The Rebellion won. We fought the Empire for a while. You, well you married Princess Leia and became a Republic ambassador."

He left Han in a stunned silence.


	16. Makacheesa

**Chapter 17: Makacheesa**

Dorin was an orange world, a brighter orange than Yavin, thin of atmosphere and possessing the appearance of a gas giant instead of something substantial, the muted colors adding to the illusion of depth. Despite the impending landing, Luke had asked Han and Kit to meet him in the common room while Chewbacca waited for permission to enter a trajectory to Lando's base.

"Just watch this." Luke said. He indicated an alcove on the back wall where, last time he had seen the _Falcon_ in his world, there had been a rack of blast helmets. There was now a shiny machine panel, some kind of security system control.

Luke held his hand toward it as if he were going to use the Force on it. He did touch the Force, feeling the strange imperfections and holes it had generated in this world. His mind touched warpings, tiny waves or whirlpools with ripples spreading throughout from them, the entire fabric of reality threatening to seethe. He found one of these familiar, took it and touched it to reality as if doing the same with the pure Force to push or create lightning.

Luke opened his eyes. There was the white blast helmet sitting in the empty niche, like when Ben Kenobi had taken it to put over young Luke's eyes.

"Ay!" Han exclaimed. "My security system!"

Luke released the Force and the panel flicked back to normal. Only then did he show a thin smile.

"What did you do?" Kit asked.

It worked.

Chewbacca yowled something from the cockpit. Han looked up. "I know it's not easy to translate from Shriwook to Kel Dor!" he yelled. "But that computer can do it! Just wait a sec!"

Han had called Lando before they arrived, confirming that he did know something...at least a few people who could get Luke what he wanted. How Lando knew them, Luke didn't bother asking. Now the _Falcon_ cruised through the upper clouds of Dorin in the company of two black cloud cars.

Lando Calrissian's keldoryn mining, secondary to similar operations on Bespin, was based on a false island half repulsor-lifted and half floating, almost soaring on wide metal wings. Each tower jutting up from the black base held spikes and spires as if all modeled after a strange, dark theme, though in reality the spikes exuded a warmth that changed the state of the keldoryn into liquid. Raindrops of it three or four times the size of those water formed dripped into collection basins all across the city.

The cloud cars guided the Millennium Falcon to a wide dock within the midst of the towers, where it settled and released gray contrasting steam into the orange sky. Familiar, with memories behind the scene that only Luke could see, Lando Calrissian and his cyborg assistant Lobot met them at the edge of the dock. The air was thin, enough so that Luke began to breathe as if in combat, regular and monitored.

There were Imperial stormtroopers with Lando, four of them standing like unperceptive droids. Han approached Lando hesitantly at first, more business like than desperately seeking help from an old friend.

"Greetings, Han!" Lando smiled brightly, seemingly unaffected by the sparse air. "Welcome, all of you, to my humble establishment. The Empire has kindly provided us with escorts, protecting from any attacks by unpleasant natives raiding keldoryn."

They began to walk toward a door in the nearest building, to all eyes an odd business party.

"So you found something the stuff is good for." Han commented, inside where oxygen was not so rare. There was a tenseness and a waiting Luke could sense. Lando was planning something. Not another betrayal, certainly not; the presence of the stormtroopers seemed to purposefully say that there was no deception on the Empire's part.

"Well, it's definitely explosive in a methane atmosphere." Lando was saying in response to Han, wearing a smile that seemed to say there was a story behind that discovery. "But it also might be used as a mild relaxant for humanoids, for either medical or wartime purposes. The difficulty is in exporting it. The Empire sanctions it but the Kel Dor aren't sure yet; we may have to change location at any time. But no danger now. Completely peaceful negotiations are nearly finished."

"Well you've made yourself into quite the respectable businessman, haven't you?" Han laughed. The dark hallways of the floating city had closed over them now. Light and noise erratically emanated from laboratory-like rooms on either side. Han and Lando bantered good-naturedly as they continued through, though Luke stayed silent. This was less finished looking than Cloud City; smaller, dark and with bare rivets and strange walkways above and below, like the lower levels of Lando's other establishment. Lando stopped at a rough door where the hallway curved in a perpendicular direction. He said something to the stormtrooper entourage then opened the door and beckoned the others inside. It was a small hanger, the orange clouds rolling at the end of a black tunnel holding a modified cloud car.

"Hurry." Lando said, rushing to the car. "They think I'm showing you a view. Chewbacca this is going to be a little tight, I'm sorry."

The five of them crowded into the car that had been expanded to fit four. Luke sat in the rear section with Kit and Chewbacca, the Wookiee's great head bent against the ceiling. Lando guided the ship out and down through the clouds.

"Thanks, Lando," Luke said after a time.

Lando took from the center console a tangle of black rebreather masks and handed three back. "Put these on." He said. "Weird atmosphere down here. I'm just helping out the cause. And I owed Han a couple favors."

"You never offered an repayment before, you swindler." Han growled.

"Well the Empire wasn't monitoring my background operations before."

"So you're only helpful when it help yourself, I get it. Disgraceful."

"But don't you remember the exchange on Iego? I was right there with you..."

Over their talk, Kit asked Luke, "So what was that you did with the Force on the ship?" He ducked then as Chewbacca lifted his furry arms to fit a rebreather mask over his muzzle. Luke tried to shift closer to the window.

"It happened by accident when I first got here, like a, a glitch in the world. There's corresponding, glitches in the Force, like places where my world is making itself known. I think--Chewie, stop moving!" The Wookiee roared and settled down dejectedly. "I think I can do that on purpose, to change things in this universe."

Kit nodded and smiled. "That could come in handy."

"Yes it could."

**T**he cloud car settled onto the rusty surface of Dorin in the midst of corrugated buildings and a few small green trees. It was a shanty town made for off-world trade, basically a collection of 'port-minders houses, a few stores, and a cantina. The streets were mostly empty of people; it was an overcast, quiet day in an arid part of the world. The group, under Lando's leadership, made for the cantina, their breath hissing quietly behind the rebreathers.

There was, on the dusty wall inside, a flimsi-and-charcoal drawing of Darth Vader. It was a good enough likeness of the black mask that typified him, just a little flat or with a line to long or at the wrong angle, and was held up by rusting metal nails pushed into the wood.

A sharp silver dart thunked into the picture beside Vader's right eye.

Luke, Lando, Han, Kit and Chewbacca entered through the swinging door from the murky clouds of Dorin, and a few heads turned then went back to their drinks. In the near corner, the Bothan who had thrown the dart bared his fangs behind a slimy-looking breath mask. He was one of the few offworlders in the room, though with the party of humans, Wookiee and Nautolan some balance was created. Most of the patrons were Kel Dors, natives, their black eyes and sharp toothed round mouths usually hidden by dark lenses and masks if they traveled around the galaxy . Most of these were dressed in uniform that probably denoted space-port workers.

Lando told the group to wait for him at the bar and went to sit next to the Bothan. This personage appeared to be a typical member of his species, besides the amphibian looking mask, dark eyepieces hooked around his canine ears, and a silver blaster across his back with a dart tip at the end of the thick muzzle. Luke didn't care who Lando knew if that being could connect him to the Rebellion. He fancied he would have taken the word of a two-headed Hutt.

At the small bar, Han was trying to bridge the language barrier by furiously pointing at the drink he wanted. The Kel Dor rotated its teeth and gestured with its heavy arms for him to go away, until Chewbacca leaned across the counter and roared. Many heads turned across the cantina and the Kel Dor barkeep seemed to become able to understand. Kit Fisto laughed and his head-tails ruffled.

Looking back at Lando, Luke saw the other man quickly gesturing and talking to the Bothan. Han realized that he couldn't drink with the rebreather on anyway and slammed the glass down on the counter angrily, the Kel Dor looking smug.

"Han," Luke said, because Lando had gotten up to leave. The Bothan threw another dart as they passed out the door, and it missed Vader and fell into a Kel Dor's soup.

Outside, Lando told them, "He's willing to help, but there aren't many of them, and they're all pretty scared about being found."

There were, mostly because they all knew chances of finding another option was massively improbable, various statements of agreement.

"We'll meet up with him tomorrow."

They walked to the cloud car through the orange mist, small figures under an overhanging sky.


	17. Alderaan Again

**Chapter 18: Alderaan Again**

A lone figure stood at the bow of the Star Destroyer _Bitter Heart_.

"Commander Horn." A petty officer called from below him. "The prisoner is awaiting your arrival, sir."

Horn appeared unmoved by and indifferent to the starfield around him, focused on the sternward doors. He was dressed not in Imperial uniform but simple black, and against regulations wore a thin yellow beard. The glimmer of the Force was in him, if you were one who could heed to those senses.

The big rear doors opened. The being led in by stormtroopers was, to Horn's eyes, quasi-intelligent or bestial, and not worthy of much consideration. Its many arms were tied, and the golden wings were tucked close to the furry body and shivered slightly, as if a muscle relaxant had been used on them.

Admiral Horn signaled for the troopers to bring the prisoner beside him on the bridge. "Ready the Death Star."

Changes were made down below, and the viewport morphed to an angle where the Death Star floated beside a blue and brown-white planet. The prisoner made a sound that might have been speech, and Admiral Horn absently said; "What?" At this very moment shielded personnel were switching and clicking the controls that would activate the Death Star's killing laser.

"You can not do this." Paqs Patra said.

"Quiet." Horn had no reservations about destroying that planet. It was an uninhabited rock to him, or even as an insect crushed under one's shoe.

"You can't do this." Paqs Patra said, all calmness and humanity. "We did nothing to the Empire. We got what you wanted. Darth Vader altered the agreement. My people are innocent of crime."

Horn didn't know exactly where respiration occurred on this type of being, but he put a Force hold on its long neck and seemed to get the desired result-it shut up.

"The Death Star is awaiting your orders, Commander."

"Fire when ready."

The prisoner's strangling head lashed, the golden wings hunched and shook, and a wild keening like a mynock's filled the bridge, though its beak was closed. Human heads raised throughout the bridge, unsure of the meaning of this new alarm.

Outside the viewport, a myriad of green lasers sprouted from the Death Star's side and then combined. The beam sprayed rubble from the planet, burned into its heart, and red light and a rumbling spread out into the vacuum.

Horn felt the deaths as flak sprayed out and against the _Bitter Heart's _shields. He felt it and took it into himself, shivered with the raw power of the Empire over the life of its subjects, and tightened his twist on the prisoner's throat. The beak opened as if panting before Horn's curled hands.

The keening stopped, and eerie silence echoed around the long room


	18. A Great Escape

_to Yaz, because I used her species name for a deity. Cue the 3PO quotes._

**Chapter 19: The Great Escape**

Master Kell could not at first remember what had happened, what K'Saavis' troops had done to her, but there was blood on her hands and it was not her own. It was red, not purple; probably humanoid. Kell got two sets of talons under her and stood up, then put one hand on the smooth white wall beside her, and looked around.

She and De'shar had been put in a smallish square cell, both apparently unharmed, though the Pho Ph'eahian agent was still curled up on the metal shelf that served as a bed. Kell stretched and swished her tails, then bent down and inspected the panel beside the door that connected with the lock on the other side. It was used for servicing and had been power-spanned inches into the panel, and would be taken out with a machine if needed.

_Bigoted humans. They always think only about themselves._ Kell set her claws on either side of the panel and began to pull.

By the time De'shar awoke Kell nearly understood what a fuzzy mind had made her forget; that a bunch of humans and a Twi'lek had added physical attacks and resistance to Lee K'Saavis's verbal refusal to comply. Some kind of grenade had gone off, and for a time she had forgotten what had happened, and that Corran was not with them anymore.

So where was he?

The plate on the wall popped free. She set it down and looked into the wire-filled cavity, ignoring the ache in her hands. De'shar came up behind her and Kell switched an eye to look. The agent just glanced at the bundle of wires, ran a hand over her tall ears and into her hair, and said nothing.

Many minutes later Kell had figured out what wires to pull, and De'shar asked, "Are you done yet?"

"No."

"Well if you-"

Kell tore a bundle of wires from the wall. A few sparks skittered across the plate scales on the back of her hand, a sensor was tripped, and the door hissed open.

Kell peered outside. Black cells lined a thin white walkway, and a fat human slept at a circular console at one end. "Imperials gettin' sloppy." She muttered.

De'shar slipped out beside her. "We need to get back to the ship and call the Republic." She said quietly.

"I know. But we have to find Corran first." With the Force she scanned the cells-all old and waiting prisoners-then cast out toward the distant _Ph'eahia_.

There was a long pause. "He's dead." She said.

"What?"

"Sidi's dead the ship's gone." Kell shook her head, but the images of the young Jedi full of life would not leave her mind's eye. He had been going to be her apprentice.

"So what do we do?"

It irked Kell, that the agent seemed not to care about Sidi or even her ship. "I don't know." She began to pace toward the exit behind the guard, her tails unconsciously lashing so that De'shar stayed far back. "We have to find Corran, or help or something." She was feeling just a little unsettled, just a little dangerous.

Suddenly a booming voice was echoing and filling the small corridor. "HELLO! HELP ME OUT OF HERE I'VE GOT A SHIP!" It turned to a whisper, a scratching version of the deep boom. Kell heard De'shar jump. "And for Kree's sake turn this down!"

Kell desperately looked for the source and found a commlink in the sleeping guard's pudgy hand. She pulled it from him with the Force and dialed the volume down, keeping an eye on the stirring human.

"Where are you?"

The mysterious voice emanated from the commlink's tiny speakers. "One five three eight. I can help you."

De'shar was beginning to hunt along the numbers.

"But who are you?"

"Here," De'shar said.

Kell looked at the agent standing further down the corridor, then at the guard. "Open it up."

De'shar patted her pockets, but apparently the equipment needed had been taken as had Kell's lightsaber.

Kell signaled for her to be quiet and tossed the little commlink. De'shar had to juggle it for a second, despite her four arms.

Kell snuck into the small control room next to the guard again, looking for a drawer or place where captured things would be put, but there was none. It would be just as easy, or difficult, to find a key card on the guard, but she wanted her lightsaber back.

She wasn't going to find it. Something as valuable as a lightsaber was undoubtedly taken by some officer, who at this moment was bragging about how he had killed a Jedi.

Finally Kell held a hand over the guard's forehead to keep him asleep while she rummaged in his pockets. She quickly passed the card to De'shar she eventually got--among a name tag and some lint--from the man's pocket.

She slid the card in and the door opened. An alien bounded out and shook itself, then solemnly bowed.

"Paqs Patra at your service." He said. "Our ship is yours."

"Ah, thank you." Kell said. "But we need to find our other comrade first, and who exactly are you?"

"Paqs Patra."

"Yes but who, what do you do? Why are you here?"

"We were an Imperial spy once. We didn't work just for the Empire though. They imprisoned us."

Kell had to assume that the plural was this being's natural mode of speaking. She herded the new, weird group toward the other door, noting just how big this Paqs was--as tall as her, that long again, and as wide.

"Have you been here since the Rebellion?" De'shar asked.

"We were at Carida for a time."

"It was destroyed." De'shar muttered.

"We know the war is over. We have been waiting a long time."

"Just wait a little longer." Kell said, and she led them out into the bland and metal-ribbed hallways of Maw Installation.


	19. Excavation

**Chapter 21: Excavation**

_A/N: Thanks be continuously to the reviewers, and also the ESPS. For optimum effect read this whilst listening to the Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack--that's how I wrote it. _

Gently the _Millennium Falcon_ settled within a white haze of snow, and its cooling jets sprayed thin streams of steam like geysers of the overhanging whiteness.

A dozen small figures emerged from the ship dressed in makeshift layers of protection against the chilling atmosphere. Luke walked first, with firm and confidant step though no apparent destination, and next Han folded his arms around himself and muttered angry curses against the planet they had descended onto. Kit's green skin stood out against the white, and snow already matted the fur of Chewbacca and the lead Bothan, a political rebel named Raylsk Nay'sro.

To Luke, the snow and cold skimmed about a layer of discipline shielding his body. Stinging points of ice were not noticed on his face as he scanned the cliffs around them, and nearly imperceptible points like target reticules aligned behind his eyes.

_here..._

A blank wall rose before them. Somewhere behind the _Falcon_ other transports were landing. Han scowled up at a shard of ebon rock showing through the snow, possibly the bedrock of a cave structure. Blue eyes connected with black for a moment.

"Stand back." Luke said quietly, and the Rebels moved. Kit Fisto folded his hands into his robes and followed the Jedi's stare upward, where a tiny yellow sun peaked the cliffs.

Luke dug his feet into the snow and turned his gaze upward, spread his arms to encompass the great caves before them--just under the snow there--and found the Force. A slight hesitancy, then from the Nautolan Jedi energy poured in, and Luke's eyes closed as he saw timelines overlap like sheets of glacier.

Rock crumbled from an invisible periphery within the cliff. Familiar melodies personified the Force for an instant within timelessness, and something opened, a rift, a whiteness-

Luke saw what the others saw, though his eyes were slitted and unseeing of the physical realms. Rock skittered from widening gaps as if a slow change were beginning beneath, and then in a shift, a change, a ripple there was an opening in that cliff and light lancing into caves beyond to refind and smooth nonexistent past corridors, and something that had been wrong was right, but the wrong was so much more terrible for the comparison.

Luke felt himself collapse, but did not embrace the cold now ringing his body until the last shift was complete, and he fell into the Force.

**W**hen Luke awoke, he found himself lying on the retractable bunk out of the _Falcon_, taken from the ship and set on the floor of Echo Base's maintenance level. He sat up, gingerly checking his physical condition. Nothing was wrong, though the cold seemed as pervasive here as it had been outside. He ignored it and sat up.

The cavernous room was more barren then he remembered, with only a thin layer of snow on the floor. One X-wing sat on the wide lift to the main hanger, and it was markedly silent.

He rode the turbolift up to the hanger. Han was there, and his ship and more X-wings, even a few snow speeders. Han dropped down from a strut of the_ Falcon_ and messily saluted. "Welcome back. Nice place you got here, though it could use a little more heat."

Luke looked around. This space too was bare, almost simplified from the old memories' completeness. "Where'd those ships come from?"

"Kit pulled them up."

"Pulled them up?"

"Outta thin air. Like you did." A Wookiee roar split the air and echoed, and the two men turned to its source, Chewbacca's furry head bent behind a speeder's beat-up chassis. "Some of them even work."

Luke laughed softly. The place felt different to him; though he set a hand against the near wall and it was solid and very cold there was something intangibly...intangible about it. Something thin, that showed itself out of the back of his mind and the corners of his eyes.

**A** few hours later, once Luke was rested, a meeting was called in one of the holoproj rooms. Kit and a company of recruits had been scouting outside, and returned looking hale and cold, reporting that there was no sign of intelligent life, nor of any of the Rebel's cannon or generators.

"We've got two hangers, a mess hall-no food mind you-, a couple barracks and this." Han was saying to the Bothan Raylsk. "But what are we doing here really. Waiting for somebody to figure out a military base just sprouted on this miserable planet?"

"No." Luke came up beside them and clapped a hand on the smuggler's shoulder. "We've got something good here."

"Was this all you Rebels had?"

"Oh no, there was much more." His gaze tended toward the north as his hand dropped to his side again. "Much more, but I can't do that yet. It's there, it's in my mind."

"Right." Han said.

Luke wearily smiled and moved past them and down into the center of the room. Again he wore the simple black uniform in which he had arrived. Though it was cold in the caves, cold enough that Han had three layers on and his thick jacket drawn up to his chin, no knowledge of it seemed to touch Luke's thin form.

Han sat beside Chewbacca and the other expectant Rebels around the holoproj on its table. Master Fisto slipped into the center beside Luke and the two Jedi spoke quietly for a moment, then Luke came to the center and Kit returned to the ranks. Luke spread his hands against the table and looked around at them all, and when he spoke there was a tone of command in his voice Han had never heard.

"We have here a great advantage, one that will continue to grow. The Rebellion will not die again. We will not let it. We are the last of the Jedi, the last of the Rebels, the last of the free people of the galaxy! Are we going to let the last just fall into oblivion?"

He stared around at the little group, and there was vivid fire in his eyes.

Raylsk started clapping, and then it was all around them, and even Han was smiling sheepishly and going along with it. Luke's response was to slowly smile. "All right, there's food in the mess hall," He said then, when his face was lit and it seemed he glowed in the light of his supporters.

**T**he food was from the _Millennium Falcon_ and various other ships, and so most of it was Corellian, preprogrammed, or Kel Dor, a wide variety of fare. People walked about or sat with the determination that their revolutionary cause had jumped from anonymity to defiance, and that in a simple display from the Jedi their resources had doubled and could be doubled again.

_These are naive Rebels._ Luke thought. _How many of them have seen real death?_

He came into the mess hall from an independent tour of the base. It was, as Han had said, incomplete. It had taken a mass of energy to create this the familiar or oft visited 'front' of the complex of caves, and he hoped to be able to do more in a few days, with Kit's help.

He saw Han among this group, talking to the Bothan leader. The smuggler had seen death...but was not a real supporter of the cause. _I can not think of him as General Solo! _What was keeping him here was probably not wanting to lose Luke's friendship again--and the fact that he was being actively hunted by the Empire. Better to not take the blame on your shoulders when it could be off-loaded onto those of vague groups like the Rebellion or the Jedi. But neither were so vague any more...

"Thanks for staying around, Han." Luke eventually said.

Han shrugged. "I've got nothing else to do."

Luke smiled fleetingly and moved on, spying Kit Fisto by the small table of food. The two Jedi had not spoken much after the revival of the base. Their friendship was strong but impersonal, an alliance between the last Jedi who, in another situation, would be unknown to each other completely.

"Would you tell me how you made those ships out there?" Luke quietly asked the alien.

Kit evenly said, "See I could sense how you had done what you did. So I could just almost feel those speeders. Like the Force was imprinted with them."

"The worlds overlap." Luke muttered, not sure where exactly the wording had come from. "The Force is strong in this place."

"I want to fight for the Rebels." Kit said suddenly. "Really fight. I'm not going to get home am I."

Luke wasn't sure what had prompted that last phrase and said nothing. A human moved between them and picked a sandwich from the table. Kit seemed to brighten then. Luke's own thoughts had been edging toward the impossibility of his own journey home.

Kit shook his tentacle-bedecked head and smiled to his black eyes. "Might as well have fun while I'm here." He said, and he turned away to get something to eat.

_While I am alive_, the words seemed to change in Luke's mind for a moment.

Luke turned to watch the gathered beings again, unable to be so lighthearted. The Force flowed strange--his own Force-'memories' given to Kit!--and the only way to get the 'real world' back was, common sense or some vestigial desperate logic said, was to change this to that, by defeating the Empire. So Luke's victory would be the Rebel's--but that victory seemed a sure defeat.


	20. Of Two Minds

**Chapter 22: Of Two Minds**

Paqs Patra saw Commander Horn for just a moment before Lord Vader moved between them, and the Sith's black mask turned to regard the double-being with expressionless menace. A blaster prodded against Patra's back, reminder of a stormtrooper escort, but Patra didn't move. Anger kept them there, a primal deep anger that made the trooper contingent with its metal and plastic guns as insufficient as insects.

Another self endlessly repeated...why did they have to leave us alive?

A trooper prodded their back again, and this time Patra moved obediently along, past the bridge of the _Bitter Heart_ with its expansive viewport and the stars in a sky black as the cave-air ringing glowing blibauls in the warm caverns of home. Such a sour reminder!

_They let us live. They killed our people, and left us alive to be tortured for information we don't have and for us to tell the galaxy of the great might of the Empire!_

_Oh, we'll tell them!_

The entourage turned a corner into an empty plasteel hallway, their destination the hanger holding Patra's ship. The troopers' security was lax; they had only bound Patra's sets of hands. The voices of the Imperials on the bridge could be heard only as soft buzz.

Patra planted their feet and pivoted, and two of the four troopers clattered to the ground when Patra's tail collided with the armored bodies. The second group brought their blasters up--close but clumsy--Patra flared one golden wing, dropped the other and watched with their head-mind the standing group back away from this prisoner that had become a beast.

The short fingers of Patra's wing closed over a rising trooper's blaster hand, and the man yowled and dropped the gun. Patra stepped back, brought the blaster up and clumsily turned and fired.

They got caught with one bolt through the left wing membrane, but it wasn't important. A fallen commlink crackled and an Imperial voice spoke from among the bodies;

"Hello? What's going on down there?"

Patra placed a talon on the commlink then leaned down and snapped, "Nothing wrong." Verbal battle was not their strong point, and they knew it. Then they stamped down on the commlink, imagining the satisfying crunch to be the ripping apart of Vader's own birth world. Vape whatever planet spawned that monster!

But the mission at hand was information. They must reach the Rebels, hear the Imperials, make the change quickly!

_Vader's powers are supernatural, but they can be resisted_. The brain housed in Patra's winged flesh thought. Already their body was backtracking, the voices getting louder in their ears.

"You've found something?" Vader's bass-tech rumble.

"It's a weak signal, sir, but something's down there." Horn's voice.

The small-mind calmed then, cleared, folded the body's wings beside itself and took their physical presence as all it needed. This was old discipline--shut down.

The head-mind for a moment panicked. But claws against the floor, that was all it needed, and there in the back was still the sense of we. Listen!

"My lord, worlds like Hoth hold many uncharted settlements. It could be smugglers, it could be--"

"That's it. The Rebels are there, and Skywalker is with them. Prepare the attack."

"Yes my lord."

Hoth. Needed information.

Paqs Patra turned and ran, claws clicking the hallways. The hanger would be nearby--prisoners like him were not taken long distances with a guard of four. Minds meshed again and were comfortable. And in the bridge, Vader turned for a moment and in the space of a machine-breath wondered why that tiny presence had somehow rung familiar with the prisoner even now being lead away.


	21. Another Memorable Thud Brought To You By...

_also_ _to Koraty, who laughes with me at reality and X-Wings, and has no idea I dedicate all this stuff to her. _

Commander Horn felt just a tiny shock, like waking abruptly from deep sleep. "Open bay 5138." He muttered. There was great reason to, _great _reason, and the techs in the pit heard that, or were simply afraid of him, and quickly made the order fact. A spasm, like an upheaval in the Force, and-

-Commander Horn felt a tiny shock, like waking abruptly from deep sleep.

"Prepare the attack." Darth Vader said. "Now, no ship is to leave. Jump to hyperspace soon, Commander."

Horn bowed, nonplussed by the abruptness. Finally the Rebels destroyed, crunched beneath the Imperial heel. Vader sensed his inferior's glee at this and, smiling grimly behind his eyes, exited, his black cape sweeping along the floor.

Corran Horn, Jedi Knight, left his body and the cold floor beneath him as if these things formed as a shell around his battered true self. The body, accepting of gravity and without movement completely, was the same and somehow different, here again in Maw Installation.

He levered himself up on hands and kneees, and when his feet were under him saw Leeondro K'Saavis and stopped mid-movement, realizing that the time machine was now in the inventor's hands.

_The Empire._

_Me._

_The dark side?_

K'Saavis' Twi'lek aid was tapping at the room's computer with clawed fingers. The cragy alien face turned toward them then.

"It worked." Corran growled. He remembered K'Saavis, Kell, De'shar as if from a different life, another person's mirror reflection. Closer to reality were Darth Vader, that alien animal-person, Admiral Hyla who had ordered the Death Star to fire-

"Look at this" The Twi'lek said, and K'saavis moved to look into the computer screen. Corran stood with general difficulty. _What in the Seven just happened to me? _Everything was rapidly feeling normal.He staggered up, bound for now only by his curiosity toward what would be shown on that sceen. The Twi'lek's claws pointed out a dial or reading shown there in the lower right corner, though the image Corran studied first was of the containment field he had been held in, and himself repeatedly falling and disappearing as if into the floor. The others' eyes were on the dial.

"You're sure this is right" K'Saavis asked after a time.

"Hmm." His aid nodded.

K'Saavis looked to Corran, the time machine held tightly in his hands; his gaze wavered between Corran and tha machine. "Interesting thing you have shown me."

"What's that" Corran asked.

"You did not travel through time at all! There was, on this screen, an image of a galaxy where the Empire had never fallen! Where what w_as _back in the Civil War _is! _Amazing." There was a light in his eyes and passion in his voice, a scientist reveling in science.

They used the machine on me. Corran just then realized or remembered. And with K'Saavis' words and a digging back in his mind and the Force he was remembering also what exactly had happened. He felt just shock.

The Twi'lek snagged some kind of sensor or pad off Corran's forhead and connected the thng-a disklike silver device-to the computer. And there was the bridge of the Star Destroyer _Bitter Heart_, and Darth Vader turned toward the screen, commanding him. The Twi'lek rewound it in a second, then it played from the beginning, all of Corran's experiances. That nameless planet shattering into fragments of sparks...He let anger wash over him and away. What now, what to do? Two Wiphid Force-users stood at the doorway.

"So it is like an alternate history." K'Saavis quietly said. "Here you are Jedi Knight, there dark commander, here I am renegade loyalist...there..."

Greed and power lust rose in his sense. Corran, disgusted, tried to understand. That was an _alternate reality? _The present, where the Empire still lived? Those dials must have tracked years, standing still while the camera rolled.

There was a knock, like a thunk or thud actually, and the thre of them turned toward it. The Whiphids looked midway puzzled and fierce, and one of them stepped back as another thud and shiver shook the door. K'Saavis looked at his major domo with undesguised pleading and stammered"Do something". Corran stepped back a pace.

The door blew off its track and tore the edges off the connected wall. A second or too after the violent scream of metal it had slammed against the opposite wall and dug into the plasteel, missing K'Saavis only because he ducked behind the computer stand. In the doorway, Master Kell stood in rising blaster smoke-a result of De'shar's crisping of the left Whiphid-palms thrown out before her and a grin that looked more like a fang-toothed challenge splitting her long face. She lowered her hands and strode in then, confident as a barrister in court. The Twi'lek's blaster flew to her hand.

"Party's over, K'Saavis. This place is gonna be shut down but good." The razor-blades at her wrists were out, but inside she was deep-space calm, and full into the Force. As she spoke De'shar propped a vibroblade against her shoulders and when the remaining Wiphid bodyguard pulled a blaster on him Kell's other companion, a white-furred alien, disarmed him with something like a four-armed teras kasi move. Kell swung her head around and knocked the Whiphid out with a stare and flick of her tails. So Corran missed K'Saavis depress a button on his commlink, and when the inventor moved out from the computer it was with his hands above his head and his expression passive or resigned.

"Alright, Jedi." He said. "Whad'you want"

Then the danger sense bloomed like a pain behind Corran's eyes, and he and Kell were runing for the torn door and K'Saavis in the other direction to a second exit Kell's Force attack had barely missed. De'shar faltered and was going to ask what was going on but Corran grabbed her shoulders and pushed her out ahead of him.

Corran heard a laser blast, so much bigger then a blaser's, and repeated spurts heralded the cracking of thick transparisteel. Corrran looked back.

Three black ships poured lasers into the rapidly shredding room, and space pulled at his clothing and chilled the regulated air. At the other end of the hall a blat door was closing-the Twi'lek, orange eyes staring, lost his fragile grip on the computer stand. With a pang of darkness, Corran turned and made for the blast doors, climbing through the angled canter before it closed completely and he was in the stillness of the other side.


	22. Some Doom

**Chapter 24: Some Doom**

_A/Ns: this one's to Kevin J. Anderson, for the praxeum and a bunch of cool stuff about Corran._

_Update: Abominable spelling excised. _

"So, where've you been?" Corran asked Kell. She seemed to have a destination, and he was out of it enough to just follow.

"Busted out of a detention block, busted into a comm room, wandered around mindtricking scientists until we found you."

"Ah." Corran said. "Sounds fun."

"Republic forces on Kessel and Fwillsving are on their way." De'shar said smugly. "They'll get through the black holes in a few hours."

Kessel yes, but the others would take more time, in which the Jedi team didn't have much to do but hang around an unfriendly station. Kell was obviously ruffled by De'shar's statement; Corran could imagine some conflict had grown up between them over the issue of calling outside forces. Kell was strict with working in small, easily understandable groups like hunting packs. But apparently the agent's logic had won out.

"Paqs here has a ship." Kell said, and the alien gave a nod. "Once the station's secured we're taking the scientists out for questioning and vaping the place. There aren't that many people here. Less then there were what Daala stayed here."

Sounded good to Corran, except for the part about sitting around until the fleet arrived. There were still things to do here.

"I have to go after K'Saavis. He made it out."

Kell raised her muzzle as if sniffing. "You're right. De'shar, Paqs, get to the ship and wait. We'll be back."

"I think I should go alone. I know how the machine works, it won't take long, and you need to call Coruscant and Yavin."

She nodded. "Go be the hero then." There was some worry in her voice, but her own state of suppressed independence made her feel for him. He snapped off a salute and ran.

He could sense K'Saavis and his fear, and took to unfamiliar hallways, running past empty rooms and eerily vacant corridors. The inventor had not expected to be infiltrated like this, or there would be more like those Wiphids. The place had been used as a passive attack against the Republic, shipping most of the new developments out to the dwindling Remnant.

Close to his quarry Corran crossed over a transparisteel bridge to another asteroid, and saw a group of those insectoid ships that had blasted the room he had been held in. They didn't fit into the picture. He had seen no hangers to dock them or pilots to fly them, but there they had always been. And they had taken out Sidi Driss, a Jedi apprentice with shipboard skill, so they had to be good. Where did they train?

Corran left these thoughts for the final approach to K'Saavis' hiding place. The door of a large and empty laboratory room was wide open, and he cautiously looked inside.

He was either to late or just on time, he wasn't sure which. K'Saavis was standing with his back to Corran, but as the older man turned to look at him he could see the silver machine in his hands. Then, slowly like dissolving or sinking into murky water, the inventor disappeared.

_Blast._ Corran walked over to the machine now sitting on one of the long white tables. He pressed his hands to the table surface and looked down at the machine.

Apparently one of the weaknesses of the thing was that it universe-traveled its user but not itself. K'Saavis had gone somewhere, but he couldn't come back, but that wasn't a problem for him because his operation here was doomed. Working like he would have in a CorSec investigation, Corran figured that the destination had been the Imperial-controlled AU they had tested. K'saavis would live quite nicely in the Empire he supported, and discover whatever he wanted about the matching of people that seemed to happen when universes were crossed. And was that the same universe Luke had been taken to, those weeks ago? Something told him it was. Though neither memory or other data supported it, it made sense that the universe the first machine had found, the easiest to get to or 'closest' and that that the machine Luke had used was set to, would be the first one K'Saavis would test out on the new machine. Following the inventor would therefor solve more than one problem.

The activation button was clearly marked, and the incomprehensible louver controls remained set the way they had been when the Imperial left. Corran pressed the button, gritted his teeth and disappeared.


	23. GaraKatte

**Chapter 25: Gara-Katte**

It was snowing at Echo Base. Again.

Four planetary days had brought the base to operating maximum. Han and Paqs Patra had been persuaded to contact any smugglers or friends-of-a-friend that would take up arms against the Empire, and a few ships arrived every day and squeezed into the lower hanger beside snow speeders and X-wings. Every once in a while the snowy complex would be expanded, and some Rebel would come to Han reporting that there was new barracks or hallways or medical wards and one of the Jedi lying half-conscious between the new and old. With the recent excavation of an ion canon and its control room Raylsk had vowed to get the gun running and spent most of her time buried in the tech of the complicated control room.

On the fourth day Luke, Kit and a mechanic named Bade ventured out into the light snow on foot, their objective to recreate the generators to the east. A herd of docile tauntauns dug for ice-dependent plants beyond the ridge where the tall, shell shaped bank of generators had been.

_Had been/were/are/would be_

Luke could feel them in all times, simultaneously a paradox and what 'should be'.

Kit's Force power--the Nautolan had willingly taken the role of power source when he could not see the other-worldly object of their regeneration--threatened to sweep from Luke in a torrent. He let it flow steady. _There must be a way to do this without taking a day's energy out with it. _He channeled Kit's power to his own preservation, and could 'see' more clearly the metal coagulating as if from the air. Pipes burrowed through their own tunnels, and back in the base Raylsk jumped when sparks flew from a section of transforming wall. Lights came on all over the control room, and Raylsk bared her teeth and slapped a hand down on the console, her violet eyes unmistakably smiling.

Luke woke up in the snow, and from the stable temperature of his body it had been only a few seconds. He sat up.

Kit was conscious as well but supported by Bade, a stout Kel Dor brought to check the functioning of the generator and to, if needed, carry one or both of the Jedi home. But the generator was real and humming, and Kit groggily smiled when Luke stood up.

"Well." He sighed. "It worked."

"Congratulations, Commander Skywalker." Bade said.

"Get out your binocs, Bade." Luke spoke with quick urgency in his voice now.

Kit stood on his own, looking out toward the eastern horizon.

Bade handed Luke the electrobinoculars, and the Jedi put them to his eyes though he thought he knew what he would see.

Walkers on the horizon. The field of the binocs could encompass only a fraction of the vast machine, the great round foot or the swaying head, metallic against the white mountains and robin's-egg sky.

Luke handed the binocs back. "Go back to the base." He said.

"And leave you, sir?"

"Yes." Luke looked to the horizon again, and cold wind whipped his hair against his skin. So it was now, was it? Sooner than expected.

The Kel Dor hesitated, and Kit said, "The commander knows what he's doing." And they turned away.

**O**ut on the white plains, the Imperial forces advanced . Commander Horn watched it all on blue screens surrounding his pilot's seat of a gara-katte, one of the new AT-AR, or "runners". The alien name granted these war machines by their slave manufacturers had stuck however, and they remained gara-katte. Beside the lumbering AT-ATs they were infinitely fast and maneuverable, modeled after some fleet feline. Blasters were mounted to either side of the 'head' and a military grade ion cannon extended over the cockpit from the wide back. There were five of these traveling with three AT-ATs, and a squadron of TIE bombers overhead, trailing scraps of atmosphere from their wing panels and double hulls.

The Rebel base appeared ahead as a blip on a screen. "Ready positions." Horn said. Ayes and affirmatives were received from the other pilots.

These gara-katte handled like a podracer. Horn eased both horizontal sticks foreword and the machine sprinted, drawing near to the flanks of the AT-AT at the head of the formation. He could see level with its main leg joints.

Tactical screens brought up the base's red-highlighted outlying generators, so far unprotected. Horn punched in the command for a primary target to be set, and on another screen the TIEs sped up.

But wait. Life reading in the shadow of the generators.

"Hold your fire."

Zoom-in showed a man standing by the generators, just waiting facing the wind. And in the Force--a call, just the tiniest bit mocking; come and find...

Horn held up a hand and gave the comm-command for full stop. His war machine paced forward.

It stopped level with the Rebel, and when the cockpit opened Horn showed himself to need no protection of weapon or heavy clothing, armored instead with the dark side he could feel pulsing at his fingertips. But the insolent Rebel spoke before he could, in a clear voice that carried through frigid air.

"You will take me to Lord Vader."

Funny... "Why should I?"

"Because I am his son."

This Rebel, this Sith whelp? Horn felt himself grimace. The young man before him rose on the Force, and he could see some power in his eyes and the set of his thin body.

Horn raised and clenched his gloved fist, and that power of movement was in his control. "You answer my requests, Sith."

"Our requests are the same."

Horn nodded and gestured. Jerkily the Sith's body lowered to the gunner's seat, behind Horn in the gara-katte head. He needed no gunner; the Force gave him enough control over himself and his machine to work all systems. Now the Sith sat, calm and cornered.

Horn looked back at him for a moment and scowled. He would not resist this man's orders--though what the Rebel said could not be true. And surely no one could use the Force against Vader's highest acolyte! Horn's mind was sound and his own.

The cockpit closed, and the gara-katte pivoted.

"Bandon, take command. I have an errand to run."

"Yes Commander."

The Sith sat still, eyes foreword. Horn turned to his controls and busied himself with launching the gara-katte into space.

Not all the new machines could do this, take to the black spaces when they were meant for the warmth of planets. But always Horn had to have the best, and so with precision deserving of the Maw scientists that had fashioned them wings of girder-metal swung from the gara-katte's sides and two drives raised from the animalistic bulge of back legs. Two leaping, jarring strides and it was in the air, and the white planet dwindling below.


	24. A Beneficial Paradox

**Chapter 26: A Beneficial Paradox**

Within the base klaxons screamed and pilots ran to ships, and smugglers raised their metal fortresses from the lower hangers. Many of Corellian make, the recruited space vessels were varied in type, quality and strangeness, and paraded out to meet the TIE fighters and orbiting attackers.

Bade the Kel Dor lurched into the command room, filled with revived screens and motley Rebels. "Ground forces, they're here!"

"No!" Han gave him a sarcastically disbelieving stare and quickly switched attention back to the screen he was bent over, manned by Raylsk.

The Bothan pawed a lock of mane out of her eyes. "And if the Death Star isn't here yet you know it will be soon."

"Yes, I know! Chewie!"

"He's at the _Falcon_, sir." Raylsk said.

"Luke left himself to be taken, commander Solo."

Han whipped around to face Bade. "What?"

"He said to leave him."

Han pushed his chair out from the screen and stood up. "That insane kid..."

Kit ran in, breathing heavy. "Troop carriers dropped."

"Where's Luke?" Han shouted.

Kit stared steadily. "We had talked about this. Skywalker said he was going to defeat the Emperor in the same way he had before--giving himself up to him and fighting inside."

"Last time he got killed!" Han said, not bothering with the fact that that really made no sense. He grabbed the back of Raylsk's chair and poked at the screen. "Where are they?"

"You'd never get out of the atmosphere before--"

"Where are they!"

She traced a trajectory. "Heading out. Looks like to this Star Destroyer..."

Han realized then how many ships were in orbit...three Destroyers so far, one a new SSD. And all those TIEs... "We're going after them." And he pushed his way out.

Kit followed him, and caught up at one of the last small corridors before the main hanger, where static fields around each doorway were placed to keep the snow from being tracked or blown in.

"You can't interfere with his plans." The Jedi said.

Han didn't turn around.

Kit stepped around the human and smoothly blocked the hallways. "You're needed elsewhere, Solo. The ground troops have to have a leader."

Han looked dangerous for a moment then nonchalantly shrugged. "Luke doesn't want help, fine."

"Patra's up there with the Star Destroyers. I need you to go with the ground troops defending the back entrance to the hanger."

Han sarcastically looked as if he were thinking about it. "Outnumbered, risk certain death, against the Empire's best for an improbable cause? Why not?"

Kit moved aside. Han turned back for moment. "And what are you going to be doing?"

"Fighting any dark Jedi who try to get in with lightsabers."

"Oh. Enjoy."

Kit just thinly smiled.

**H**an really wasn't sure why he did what he did lately. A combination of boredom, friendship and guilt over Luke, a desire to avoid various bounties on his head from beings like Jabba the Hutt and a mild derision for the Empire, all those things could add up to joining the suicidal-seeming Rebellion...but only, Han figured, for someone with less sense and more character than the average citizen of the galaxy.

It made sense to him and Chewie.

So here they were, lying against a snow drift with the frigid wind steadily and carelessly trying to chill them to the marrow, waiting for a brush or two with death.

Raylsk stirred impatiently beside Han. She had wanted to come–"see what it's like"--while someone else manned the control center. He did not doubt just what she was going to see, but he was not going to get in the way of a young leader learning her life lessons.

Chewbacca whuffed and bobbed his head, and there ahead crossing the plain where far in the vague distance lasers flashed, the first orderly columns of stormtroopers broke from their hiding places and pressed the attack.

One group was headed by a human female and the other by an armored trooper commander bearing cape of office and a large dull-metal rocket launcher. Immediately they made for the sparse cover to either side of the narrowing canyon entrance at which the Rebels were stationed, and Han took the opportunity to lift himself up on his elbows and pepper the right side with blaster shots. Two fell, the others gained ducking room and fired back. Chewie had the left, and Raylsk kept her head down and ears back, eyes to her weapon's sight not shooting but tracking everything that moved.

The female Imperial leader possessed no obvious weapon or armor but stood straight behind an outcropping of snow covered rock and shouted militaristic orders while keeping disconcernedly green eyes fixed firmly on the Rebels. The few shots Han put in that direction missed or were deflected somehow--possibly she had a rare energy shield.

The almost comically armored snowtroopers leaned out from cover or dove for fallen weapons and died splayed out against the snow, and tense energy was apparent, growing in the woman leader's graceful body.

More Imperials coming, running in comm silence but with crunching footfalls.

Raylsk had shot someone, a trooper by the left wall and close to them, that Chewie had also hit. She was watching it, the green bowcaster sparks conducted by reinforced plastic leading an eerie glow, but when Han elbowed her shoulder for attention she looked at him with clear eyes.

"Cover me." Han stood up and jump-slid down the face of their natural cover, landing with a hand behind him and the full-power blaster coming up in the other. The first two shots he got off speared into snow--the Imperial woman stood cool and unconcerned--then Han moved forward and aimed again.

To his great surprise and shock the woman came toward him, almost a jump foreword, with a red lightsaber growing in her hands and rising into an attack cut that Han had seen Darth Vader destroy old Ben Kenobi with. Chewbacca roared, Han yowled, backed up and aimed his blaster in both hands.

He felt empty air beneath his feet and heard the lightsaber thrum overhead at the same time, and then felt himself falling and landed against the cold and hard ground of a previously nonexistent trench.

The next wave of snowtroopers rattled into the narrows. The she-Sith jumped the trench and stood for a moment in front of Chewie and Raylsk. Han propped his blaster against the top of the trench on the other side and started picking off snowtroopers entering the canyon. The Wookiee and the Bothan, he fierce and she wide-eyed, saw the woman Imperial pause before them with her head up and red hair flying, as if she scented the air. Then she jumped, again covering great distance in a flying leap. Raylsk turned, but Chewie called for her attention to return. Smoke and snow were rising in that thin place, and Han lost no time marveling about where the clearly man-made trench had come from; he just shot.


	25. insert: Agent Training

_A/N: this belongs after chapter 7. Sorry about the confusion!_

**Chapter 8: Agent Training**

'_Jedi'_, De'shar reflected, watching the nothingness of hyperspace go by. _'A rare sight, and I've got three of them.'_

Jedi, supposed to be great warriors. What De'shar fancied she knew of war made her comfortable enough with it, as long as she had a blaster at her side and the authority of the Republic at her back. Death would bring her to the high plane, her chosen one of all the thousand faiths.

The day training had begun was a chaotic one. Small comfort to the younger De'shar was the other Pho Ph'eahian in the green group, a dark-complexioned male named Zax. He had been forced to the Republic offices by a sinking financial state and a genetic history of fighters. Some said his grandmother and grandfather had served in the Clone Wars.

They bonded, and changed together. Never had it gone into a romantic relationship--he had said it would feel wrong to him, like they were pairing out of convenience in common origin. She was all right with that, agreed actually, once she found out his reasoning.

An anecdote; afternoon at the targeting range. De'shar had been mildly successful with an ion blaster in two hands, shooting shielded remotes out of the air in front of a bluescreen. Zax took aim beside her, braced two elbows and turned to look at her.

"You know it takes something special to kill a man." He stated, in his passive way. "What makes some being able to do it for love or money or homeworld and the next one can't?"

De'shar put her ears back. "Hmm." She had never really thought about it before. "You do what you have to."

"But some beings can't. All of us here, of course, though we stun for our Republic."

"Jedi teach not to kill. Not even to attack." She had wanted to be a Jedi from way back. Could never, of course, but the security career had started from those impossible dreams.

Zax lifted his blasters again. "Jedi, so different. Complicated people, them."

"I always wanted to be a Jedi."

"You want to be the best of everything, 'Shar-cal." It was an affectionate term, friendship labeled in Pho Ph'eahian. He was jovial, unconcerned.

"Yeah," She said. "Who knows what I'd say to a Jedi if I ever met one."

"Show him you're the best." Zax said, and laughed, and turned back to the range.

De'shar slid the safety of her blaster back with her thumbs and used a third to activate the range-droids. She beat Zax that day, in score and jest. He would die eight months later in a jewel heist, victim of a trip mine that scathed the fur from half his face. Coming in afterwards, De'shar had never forgotten it.

And listening to Masters Kell and Horn and Sidi Driss, she knew what she felt now in their other-worldly presence.

Deep jealously.

Even something little, starting with Horn's underhanded trap of the Imperial Remnant agents, had made it maddingly obvious that he for one was in the way of this title of best in the combat forces. And there was always that reminder, a tick in the back of her mind;

If I were Jedi I could have saved Zax.

Yes, the illogical childhood aspirations were gone. De'shar was what she was. But hope rose in her at the prospect of this joint mission. Hope that she could prove herself.

That she could finally be the best, when the Jedi had been taken by their enemies' time machine.

_Go ye now to what is listed as chapter 8. Thank you, the management._


	26. insert:Finding Nemonus

**Chapter 20: Finding Nemonus**

The meetings with the Rebels had gone well. Almost thirty people, some called from other planets by Lando, had met Master Luke's group at dawn of the next day on Dorin. They represented humans, Bothans and Kel Dor, and brought with them two medium-sized ships hastily outfitted with probably black-market weaponry. The departure had been quick, and now they were en route to the world called Hoth, where, Luke said, the Jedi could resurrect a ruined base.

Now Kit Fisto stood at the forward viewport of the _Falcon_, the only outward-looking window in the ship. The others; Luke, Han, Chewie and the most motivated of the Rebels, were in the common room holding a sort of conference. Kit was feeling a bit sick, so he had declined to join the debate he could hear in the other room.

His skin felt dry, probably not just from lack of hydration. He felt confused, spaced out, unable to concentrate, not to mention out of shape because of all the riding around in space.

He found his mind casting back to the days before his world had fallen apart more than it ever he thought it could. He had resisted looking back before, because it was too confusing and harsh, but now he rested his long-fingered hands on the console as if for some kind of basis for reality, and then he went back and remembered.

The Jedi Temple was ruined, the Order dying. The government had changed hands, and somewhere this news just washed over the citizens of a planet too far away to care. Glee Anselm was like that, but Coruscant was not, and Glee Anselm was as far away as Kit's Jedi starfighter crushed beneath the Temple.

Kit splashed through a layer of oily water over the ferrocrete street between gray Coruscant rains. The rain turned everything gray, a melodramatic precisely scheduled downpour that nearly drowned out the running footsteps behind him. He paused for a moment under an overhang and shook his head, and raindrops slid between his head-tails.

There was the sound of clone troopers' boots on sidewalk and the barks of vornskrs behind him, and another squad ahead. Between them and Kit there stood an open reservoir from the Manarai Mountains, and there Kit hoped to escape. Where to he didn't know. He could stay in the ugly waterways of lower Coruscant forever. And so he continued on.

The reservoir was not public; it was not much more than a pit that used to have a force field over it until it had cost to much to keep up. Memory tinged the blue-black water and rusting gray metal with fear and disgust. At the surface of the water, halfway down the tank walls now, a metal jetty extended to the midpoint. The second group of "Imperial" clones and leashed vornskrs stood there, the beasts craning their black heads upward.

The troopers below saw a figure, someone, throw himself from a ledge higher up and splash into the water many meters below. The vornskrs brayed and strained toward the stilling pool, and lasers from the other group of Imperials flashed down to where the water had plumed.

Below, Kit plunged through a column of bubbles to nearly the bottom of the reservoir. The water was cold, and smelled of rust and pungent purifiers.

A laser bolt boiled through the water far above him where sunlight brightened the blue. Confidence regained, Kit swam for the center of the pit and the grated pipe that there descended out of it. His lightsaber would be a mechanical energy to pinpoint; so the Force pulled the bolts from the grate.

The moment of concentration required kept him from the material aspects of the Force just long enough that the warning came late and he felt the pressure of the water and heard the roar before danger was in his mind. Kit pushed himself from the bottom of the pit and swam a stroke, then a missile of some kind impacted on the floor, and metal screamed. When the white bubbles cleared the grate was buckled and twisted back into the shaft; the way was blocked, and a second missile coming down.

'_Like shooting fish in a barrel!_' Kit laughed morbidly. There was a second explosion and wash of heat not far away. Kit's options were fading--he could stay down here indefinitely, for days or until the troopers ran out of missiles, but maybe he would be shot before then. Maybe those troops had resonance imagery or guidance systems, something smart that could find him in these depths.

Kit took a deep breath and circled the pit looking for any cracks or hiding places, dissipating his once-rising fear with the familiar ache of stressed muscles and the beating of his hearts. There was joy in these things, much joy, but as he paused by a riveted seam and wondered about pulling it apart another missile thundered down behind him, and the deep fear of death was for a moment upon him. Then he flung a Force shield out in front of him, and for a moment Kit was silhouetted and splashed with light as the thing exploded. He was pressed against the hard wall, and there was a fierce ache at the back of his head.

Maybe Master Fisto felt the same as Master Skywalker then as they were both being hunted, maybe they heard that same music, or maybe it was just random like so many things are, and the flux forty years later just happened to save a life in the past. It propelled Kit to the future, and he found himself in a few feet of water and beside a pack of vornskrs.

To the Kit of the future, who stood at the helm of the _Millennium Falcon_, it made no sense. He knew that he was alive now because of that fluke or Force, but the world he knew was dead. The Jedi, the Temple, the sparks of life. What omnipotent Force would save one being to live with that knowledge? He knew that thinking this over and over again would only dull his mind.

_There is no death, there is the Force_.

Kit felt the Force--_I have been chosen for a reason_--and grinned and shook his head because thinking about these things was so useless when there was life to be living. He turned and walked out into the curving corridor, to join the others. From the common room, a Bothan laughed.


	27. For the First Time Again

**Chapter 27: For The First Time Again**

As they left the atmosphere he could see the ground battles beginning; AT-ATs and those second generation walkers versus snow speeders and the single ion cannon. To quickly white clouds blocked Luke's sight.

_I should have told Bade to go for the walker's legs._

_I am not deserting them. I'm saving them. I must survive, because I already have!_

"Corran." He said then. Luke had been watching this Imperial who thought of himself as Commander Horn of the Imperial space-navy. He was Corran Horn as Han was Han, Luke assumed, taken on a different timeline. He no more knew or believed in his 'real' self then Luke would have had the paradox been presented to him.

"Quiet." But the bearded face turned back toward him for a moment.

Luke answered the unasked question softly, watching his hard reflection on transparisteel. "Yes, I know many things you wouldn't expect."

**T**heir craft slid into the greater silver of a Star Destroyer and crouched there, its curved mechanical limbs pulled close to the body as if in the death curl of an insect. Stormtroopers surrounded the unexpected arrival.

When Darth Vader arrived, it was to an organized circle around the bound Rebel, sour anger rising from Horn standing beside him (anger purely at lack of resistance), and blue eyes dark. Luke stood with his hands before him, centered, paying no attention to anything but his father's mind. This meeting, dark and light for the first time again, weighed on possibilities.

"So," Vader rumbled. "A Jedi hidden in the Rebellion offers himself up to me."

"Jedi," Luke heard Horn mutter incredulously. It was a dead word here.

Luke's voice was even, resonating, testing. "I offer myself to the truth, father." Horn flinched and looked from Luke to Vader, even the stormtroopers drew in stale breath, but the boy did not move. "There was no reason to know, no, not after Yavin. But I am back, now, and soon the Empire will see."

"What!" Vader growled. A shock filled the frame of black armor and then for a moment Vader could not speak. Then a gloved hand swept out toward Horn and his entourage, a violent gesture backed by the force of Vader's body. "Get out! Leave us!"

Horn hustled his people away, leaving the empty corridor and the men dressed in black. Luke looked at Vader. Vader sampled the Force.

Luke felt Darth Vader take power for his own, so the Jedi rode with it when he felt himself lifted and pushed, a wave of darkness that crested with Luke hung at the wall, his spine against that hard surface, and the Sith moved to within inches.

"What do you mean, Jedi?" Vader rumbled.

Luke looked down at his father. At the black lenses and gloved hands twisting the power, and simply said, "I return to avenge the past."

"You are dead!" Red light sheened in Vader's eyes. Killing light, though inside--and never had he seen this before--there was some eternal patience.

This was not what Luke had foreseen. But without the Force such things were not to be trusted.

"I was dead in a wrong world, father. But we can change it. I feel the good within you."

Vader released his hold and turned away. Luke came to the ground smoothly. "Take me to your emperor now."

"I can sense that you have completed your training. My son...And now you give yourself to us." Vader's laugh was in his voice, his deep airy breathing.

"I have." Luke looked up and met the shaded eyes. "I have returned from the dark side enough. You will not turn me now." All plans were washed away, picked apart, in half-remembered words. It was a power of its own right, to speak like this--and therefor it was a danger. Luke fell silent.

"You do not know the power of the dark side. You resist it!" Vader's fist clenched, and anger rose. Only for a moment had he turned toward Luke again, all Imperial presence. Only for a moment had something affected that dark soul. "It can not be resisted."

Luke spoke quickly. "The person you once were, Anakin Skywalker, resisted. There is still hope for him."

A shock from the dark lord, an anger that growled in Vader's voice like thunder on the horizon of a lava-strewn world..."He is dead." Vader turned away from any sadness that might, just might, have shown in his voice, covering it with this overarching anger. Knowledge was an attack on Luke now, a feeling of falling and becoming a pit that was only distinctly connected with a long-ago advantage, taken now with the finesse of a Master turned malignant depravity. "And the Emperor will show you new truth."

"Then my father is truly dead." Luke said, but it was to quiet for anyone to hear, and the turbolift doors at the other end of the hall hissed open.


	28. Resident Jedi

**Chapter 28: Resident Jedi**

It wasn't as if she couldn't see him, but Kit Fisto delighted in the fact that the Force-user around the white corner would wait for him to show himself.

When the wait reached the right moment of tension he stepped out empty-handed.

She was human, tall and slender, pushing red hair around the curve of her shoulder to get it out of her face, using her left hand as her right loosely held a lit, red lightsaber, her tiny mammalian eyes gleaming fierce and green and with the sour burn of the dark side. He had seen it so many times before.

"So this is the resident Jedi." She said softly, with great anticipation. The lightsaber came up into a vertical guard line six.

Kit shrugged the brown cloak from his arms and pulled it over his left shoulder with his right hand, and let the fabric drop. He pulled his lightsaber from its holster with the Force, ducked and rolled to the woman's left. He brought the lightsaber up, thrumming, at the completion of the roll, grinned at the sound and the smell of anticipation.

The initial stuttering contact stemmed directly from that movement, that emotion. Red and green fields contracted and fought, and their fight-blank faces were outlined in neon.

**H**orn felt ensconced in the walker head, away from the cold of space and away from Darth Vader and his unsettling prisoner, his son.

The change came suddenly, so suddenly that his hands just had time to clench the joysticks, ridges digging red into his palms.

Corran Horn, Jedi Knight just removed from Maw Installation, woke into a new world angling for a Star Destroyer.

"Woah,"

"Come in, GK One, Commander Horn?" The voice was Imperial-filtered and issued from the open comm. Corran pushed one of the pod-style joysticks to bank port and avoid the Destroyer, but the response time was quick, the dynamics too different from those of an X-Wing. The starboard wing swept port and overhead across the view of the Destroyer, and something metal creaked. Corran killed relative motion by yanking the sticks back to neutral and the gara-katte floated, parallel to the Destroyer and silent.

Corran stabbed the comm with a finger before another staticky voice issued from the black metal.

"Ah,I'm having technical difficulties, control." He felt himself slip partly back into the persona of the Imperial commander, but now it was an act, a tool, one of many assigned identities.

"Alright, we'll bring you in with a tractor beam." The voice crisply replied.

Corran sighed and settled back in the alien-leather chair supposed to be the pilot's seat of a starfighter. The Star Destroyer grew closer, smooth silver turning to gun turrets and rivets and blue-swathed docking bays. In the Force, tension grew on opposite sides of a war not yet begun.


	29. The Unifying

Chapter 29: The Unifying _A/N: to **GAKDragonMCP**; this was under construction for a time. Therefor when I wrote that those things were not completed, and are now. In continuation..._

**I**n the expectant silence of Maw Installation, the cockpit of the _Orion _was absolutely still.

Paqs slept in their harness, folded up around themselves in a deep sleep they had learned to take when it could be taken. The nearby screens monitoring hyper- and real-space for friends and foes began to gather blips, the higher screen green and the lower red.

Master Kell and De'shar rested in the small common room between _Orion_'s humming engine nacelles, the Lizz-Sur lounged over the arm rest of an acceleration couch. The suggestion of white teeth glaring though her face was placid, as if entranced in the ways of the Jedi. De'shar lay in a webbing of similar make to Patra's pilot sling, her hands on her stomach. She absently watched the bulwarks connected to the ceiling and wondered if there were a cure for the mind-numbing that came with stakeouts. If there were, she figured, she of all beings would have figured it out by now. But the time would come, bringing with it that little fear. The Republic would come...

Kell's eyes opened. De'shar thought she saw a reflection of orange on the dark metal of the ceiling, then feet clomped on the desk and Patra awoke, talking about 'incoming'. De'shar got her legs over the side of the hammock and dropped to the floor, and by the time she had padded across to the others screens were filled with red. Low beeping punctuated a digging emotion of regret at the loss of her own ship. Patra's arms and wing claws skittered over the console while Master Kell sat at the shunted-aside copilot's seat with her knees bent, staring into nothing. What Jedi datastream was running through her mind?

De'shar slid into the second cramped seat. After all this time of waiting, thoughts alternated between Corran Horn's vague mission and the boredom resultant. Now, finally--engine whines at the edges of her hearing. She could feel her ears swivel.

"No gunner?" Kell exclaimed.

Paqs responded as the first ships flashed across the relative horizon; raindrop shaped insectoids with double, flat wings. "I fly alone, Forceworker."

Kell's eyes narrowed, and then any resentment she felt or any care De'shar had for the bickering was wiped away in the thrill of true, indescribable danger gripping the small space as Patra banked the _Orion _in an angle that let laserfire skitter overhead. A bug fighter rumbled out from above the viewport and Patra clicked at it, lined up reticles and fired. The bug jinxed, showered sparks from a port wing and sped away. Patra cursed in Basic this time. The ship flipped around and there were a pair of the little craft that split right and left and poured in lasers; Patra dove, and they twisted away, dodged their own fire and flipped back onto Patra's tail. De'shar felt the G's catch in her lungs.

"Fast..." Patra muttered, the installation swinging beneath them.

"There," Kell spoke and pointed. Over their heads to the right a bug ship angled down and Patra swung around in his webbing and threw a missile at it. It missed the body, took a wing strut off, and the bug and the missile both slammed into the station. Kell's teeth showed for a second.

"They're Force users." She realized. "Give De'shar the controls."

"What?" They said together.

"We'll never out-fly the Force unless this works." Her voice was deadly serious.

Patra, driven by superstition and self honesty, was already jumping from his web. De'shar followed Kell's gesture toward the center console. Kell looked at the setup, tipped her head and scrambled onto the hanging net in a crouch, her footclaws curling over the front of her sandals and gripping the holes in the ropes. De'shar thought she would look more natural sitting in a tree, waiting to drop down on something. Patra stood in front of the console to the right of her; the weapon array.

"Go," Kell said, and De'shar shoved the sticks forward. There were fighters coming up behind .

She accelerated them into the network of girders and walkways threaded through the asteroids of the station, better to dodge overwhelming fire. Bridges flashed overhead, looking like horizontal jail bars. Bug ships behind them spurted lasers that angled off into vacuum as _Orion _spun through blackness. They never hit, and De'shar turned back when she met open space again. A bug but across her path as _Orion _swept around the side of a building and Patra sprayed lasers at it. It juked, skimmed sideways across the metal wall and got behind them. De'shar felt strange, just a little like her hands were not her own and Kell gripped the bar above the netting, her eyes closed. De'shar was caught up in the excitement, the gut-deep thrill, the slightly out-of-control vitality of the moment. Kell hissed. De'shar heard several quick metal-screeches as lasers ripped at the unshielded ion drives, and she turned the ship relative-down under an asteroid. Two bugs came from starboard and below, and Kell thumped Patra's legs with her tail so he would shoot, and De'shar started for a dive on the second one when the first became roiling fire that sunk back in on itself in seconds.

The next target wasn't there.

"Blast." Kell said. De'shar turned on some unfathomable instinct, and there it was. Patra shot again.

Then, De'shar understood in the lee of that fireball. "What're you doing?" She exploded, turning from the controls, feeling in the sudden _lack _of...presence that those movements of success had been only partly her own.

"I need you to do what I say." Kell said. "They're too fast."

There was a patrol in triangle formation at the perimeter of the installation, cruising against the multicolored Maw.

"I'm trying to figure out what those are because they're not normal."

"It's glitterstim spice." Patra said, as if looking from a distance. "Augments or creates latent psychic powers if enough's taken."

De'shar shook her head, just as Kell gave out a little "Oh," of surprise or understanding. "You can't get in my mind. I won't let you."

The _Orion _shook. Screens showed three ships on their tail, stationary and pouring lasers. De'shar gasped, grabbed at the control sticks, and sent them forward and down-starboard. One ship followed, one unerringly angled to their front and one kept beside, just hemming them in and annoying, nearly bumping shield-energy. Patra shot point-blank at it's the front and the bug peeled away in a roll, shooting back. Now both points fore and aft flickered blue with dying shield. De'shar ignored everything and cut for open space, anger burning in her gut somewhere.

"My ship!" Patra wailed.

Klaxons whined that rear shields were failing. De'shar slapped the audio alarm off; "Stang!"

Kell leaned toward her ear. "You can't do this without us, let go of your pride. Patras, keep the thinking mind dominant."

"They both _think_, Jedi."

"Ok well let me _hang on_!"

_Let go of your pride, Jedi. _

They were coming from anywhere. No time to plot escaping the Maw, no her heart letting them leave Corran Horn behind. Old words De'shar consoled herself with as a teenager...she had wanted to be a Jedi.

"Fine!" De'shar sighed. "Take over."

"Go toward that beacon." A light blinked at the edge of a blob of pastel yellow.

De'shar shoved the sticks forward. The buglike starships had kept their distance for a time, assured of their victory with numbers, assured of their confidence in spice. Now as the _Orion _moved a set of them closed again, weaving though there was no reason. De'shar spun to meet them.

The next minute, maybe--a navicomp clicked numbers down from sixty, but no one noticed--De'shar's hands on the yokes, Patra's sharp eyes and claws, Kell's mind reaching, _knowing_...all these came together. Again De'shar felt out of control but executed nonsensically perfect maneuvers, and Patra dealt in coordinated death. In one position relative to the blinking beacon they spun, the _Orion_'s ion drives firing randomly like a pilot had gone mad had taken over. Where a bug ship went, that place dictated by precognitive ability, _Orion _was there before, and fireballs the lasting evidence. Within, Patra and De'shar held looks of deep concentration, and Master Kell's emotions could be seen not in her closed eyes but in the set of her shoulders, but in the riding of the ship's jukes and twists as the Force and Lizz-Sur spacial senses aligned in her alien mind. Stars whirled.

There was a jolt, a shock that sent fear-pain through De'shar in a bloc. Kell pitched forward onto knees and forearms, and Patra clicked loud then, when Kell was up again, translated for themselves.

"Tractor beam!"

"Wow," De'shar breathed, and she had not heard Patra.

Kell breathed through her mouth and gills, and spoke still panting. "It's all right."

"These little ships have beams!" Patra kept on, but Kell shushed him and pointed at a blue-green screen. The numbers had finished counting down, and it now showed the identification signatures and silhouettes of a group of capitol ships.

The Republic was arriving.


	30. Zero Two Prelude

Chapter 30: Zero Two Prelude

_Dedicated to Tad Williams, for inspiration and chapter names, and Master Eisley Oricla, for affecting in a good way._

Corran Horn moved quickly, because he could feel people watching at the edges of his mind, like a schizophrenic's nightmare. This though was real; in the Force was distraction. Time was running out, and he held all the resources of an Imperial officer. He stood now on the bridge of 'his' ship _Bitter Heart_, watching as the Imperials reconfigured around the immense gray-black Death Star.

It being brought into the Hoth system and placed in Commander Horn's figurative hands had been Darth Vader's final command before his taking off for somewhere in the Destroyer _Valiant. _Even more disturbing than the facts that the Empire vs. Rebel conflict here was as mismatched as the real ABY Zero and therefor Vader could spare a destroyer with confidence was that, from the scattered mental maps Corran let through his various passive defenses, Luke Skywalker had departed along with him.

There was really nothing Corran felt he could do about that now. They had been so close--but no use brooding over misses. The Death Star would not be ready to fire on Hoth for at least minutes, and then at his command, unless he was found to be fraudulent. And the codes to tactical and technological machinations of the Death Star...it was, Corran figured not without definite and grim amusement, a worthwhile experience.

He headed back down to the hanger of _Bitter Heart_, easily shrugging off flunkies wary of the impending attack. He took a gara-katte again. It would be more useful than a TIE fighter, even though it was more alien. Corran could handle a new technology, or so he told himself. It was nothing to handling a new universe.

Out in the space between floating Imperial behemoths, the gara-katte angled for the Death Star. Below--they caught Corran's pilot's eyes as flashes of silver--the rebel craft burst from white clouds trailing mist; X-wings and flat-hulled Corellians in numbers that ceased far to quickly. Corran accelerated out of the fore of the Imperial formation, praying that there would be the delay usual--the delay in which the commander of the Rebels would realize he was going into something insane.

The time was given. Inside the Death Star, just within the blue of a containment field and where he wouldn't have to fly and talk at the same time, Corran sent out a broad spectrum comm call to the opposite fleet that would look to both sides like the first taunt of a space-slaughter.

When Paqs Patra or one of his kind came on the small 2-D visual he looked ready to defend himself against just such a thing, so Corran didn't give him the time. "Greetings officer of the Alliance. I am Corran Horn, and I need to give you information vital to the survival of the Rebellion."

The alien glare intensified, though its response was unanticipated. "The real Corran Horn? _Imperial_!"

"Yes! The real, not Imperial. I have information you need to _destroy _this Death Star. I'm an old friend of commander Skywalker."

"You want me to believe that now."

"I'm Jedi; I could make you. But I'm not. I'll give you,"

"What kind of information."

"The original trench run. You can completely vape the Death Star with one of those X-wings but I need time."

Pause.

"There's no danger for you at all." Corran tried to relax the conversation anew. The alien captain's oddly-proportioned face glowed blue and white in the dimmed interior of the gara-katte.

"Tell me when." The Rebel said, and cut the comm.


	31. Physics' Decision

Chapter 31

Physics' Decision

The colorlessness melted away and the music went back into his mind, when Leeondro K'Saavis faded back into reality. He recognized the person standing before him by very manner, though the man had his back to the inventor and his body hidden in a long, white lab coat. The Force, even as Lee started to push it away because of the memories that flooded in, stuttered and told of a convergence he could not understand. The room in which he stood was as Imperial-military as the views from Corran Horn's interuniversal camera and was set up obviously as a makeshift laboratory. It was filled with many instruments that he could identify and others he could not, though they either resonated with the Force or pricked at some memory at the back if his mind. These observations took seconds.

The man in the coat began to move, and Lee saw on the desk behind him one of the spherical universe-machines. He turned and Lee saw his own face, worn and lined and rebuilt. _When Horn, Jedi, went into this world he did not encounter his other self, he had become him..._

It was not Lee's lacking command of the Force but rather his scientist's mind that made the connection. This other self not of the fringes of the Remnant but of the thriving Empire, _knew _the possibilities of his machine.

Face to face the inventors looked at each other with calculations and equations of probability rising into their conscious thoughts. Conflicting, battling for existence flashed though their minds, their selves.

Reality spasmed. Physics realized that its earlier decision that one person could not be in two places at once was being decided again.

It was less a physical death than a mental banishment. Existence tore their consciousness, self, sanity and delusion away. Half an hour later, an emissary of the Empire would find the almost identical bodies and congratulate the inventor on the completion of his experiments detailing clone madness.


	32. A Courtesy Point of View

Chapter 32: A Courtesy Point of View

_to Zachariah Jensen _

The beings monitoring the Rebel command bunker heard the danger first. On computer screens and glass-supported tactical displays the battles on the plains and in space filled their emotions. Out beyond the walls of Echo Base, Captain Solo would occasionally report to say; "They're breathing down our necks here," or "These Imperials can't shoot straight!" or "We're out of the canyons now...there's a lotta snow coming down," all generally indicating that things were going well with his team and the snowspeeders. Above, Patra was vastly outnumbered. Commander Skywalker had seemingly disappeared. No matter the individual, though, they were all surprised, afraid, when the clashes and mechanical hums some of them knew as the sound-signature of a lightsaber echoed down the narrow corridor from the hangers.

The she-Sith's Form was something switching between II and IV, but more outside Forms, a different school of Jedi training, something easy to react to so closely were her moves linked to her emotions. Kit could nearly see as well as smell her excitement and controlled fears. If a movement caught her off guard she would snap back and regain her composure before coming into the fight with brief furious speed, and if she gained an advantage in the web of green and red and bright, bright light, she would fall into a regular pattern of battering attacks that Kit could easily turn away. They were well matched.

At their arrival in the control room its previous occupants had left an open floor among the machine, some of them looking around corners-become -barricades. The consoles and workstations made all the bare avenues and floor each less than a meter wide. The only exit was another corridor similar to their own, but narrower.

This, thought Kit Fisto, would add red around his eyes.

He knew her style now, and the whirl of Form I was beginning in the back of his mind. A lock; momentary, both lightsabers up and leaning right and held in doubly straining grips.

"No _Jedi _can defeat Mara Jade, the Hand of the Emperor." The human said, her voice raised against the hissing crackle of the lightsabers. Kit grinned, finding his greatest amusement in misplaced drama and confidence in the midst of the excitement and wonder of death-play, and Mara Jade broke the lock with a tight, quick flip that brought her to stand on the control surfaces of the nearest bank of computers, crushing beneath her feet levers and exposed wire.

The information about his opponent's name came to Kit's mind and flashed out again; too quick for pondering did the resuming combat wipe it away. Names for some meant one thing; personalization of a victim. They would say it is harder to take the life of a being whose name if nothing else is known to you. A warrior of the Jedi way would disagree, because it is hard to kill at all times, all situations when the taught-instinct is to preserve life. But at times it must be done, and their lives have taught them that the greatest strength is to do what must be done. And Kit Fisto enjoyed the challenge to much to detract from it in nearly any way.

Mara Jade's lightsaber swept down from the higher ground. In the Force, where even here/now it is a close and powerful thing Kit _knew _the precise strike that would flow into the _right place, _and so after one slash had showered sparks on his head as he stepped back and away, then the dark Jedi struck again and Kit took his blade into an overhead block and twisted. Behind and below became before and above and Kit jumped, leapt, landed on the top of the console a metal tier above Mara Jade. Without taking a hand from the saber hilt the Force was harnessed and threw her from the console. She landed in a clatter on her back, knocking over two chairs and a dark-plaited deactivated droid. The cylindrical body of the droid fell over her, and the lightsaber died in her empty hand. Kit jumped down and landed on the white floor, resettling the tendrils about his shoulders. Shark's eyes watched.

Mara Jade threw out a hand and chairs and droid were flung away, folding against walls of magnet-shielded ice. She got to her feet and paced forward, and the lightsaber flew to her hand. Kit held his own blade in a low guard in his right hand.

The first energy-exchange forced the woman's lightsaber into an arc through the computer console beside her, and Kit stepped around her furious recovery for a slice that seared a shallow cut across her side. She aimed a dipping back-kick that missed, and then the lightsaber was up again and Kit carefully began to drive her backwards.

He could have cut her in half there with that restrained swipe, but hadn't. Because the Force had told him, as slowly it controlled him, they still had a place to go. A time to meet.

They moved out of the control room, down a hallway where the meter-length laser swords nicked sparks from the walls and showered them down from head-height. Kit let the battle flow, feeling his opponent's strength and subtle weakness.

Mara Jade broke out into the cavern with a full-out roll, standing again a few meters away beside a great round pit set into the rough and now unshielded ice and snow walls of the cave.

Kit stood at the entrance to the open space and looked at it for a moment, just let the Force and physical perception wash over him for precious seconds. This was not one of the rooms he, or as far as he knew Skywalker, had excavated. It looked, except for the lighted entrance, too natural to be something the rebels created, yet it looked and smelled familiar. Had the setting been spires of rusting metal instead of blue-white ice this would be the Coruscant reservoir where it all began.

Mara Jade came at him again with an overhead lightsaber strike that turned into a Force push that Kit anticipated and drew into himself, bolstering his physical stamina that was ever so obviously leaking away. He caught two strikes low to each side, fast Form I flips of the hands, then caught an overhead attack horizontal and Force-pushed.

She rode it, twisting in the air, landing at the rim of the mysterious pit. Red durasteel morphed into ice on the far wall, the materials locking together like puzzle pieces, all of it flickering out of the corner of his eyes like it was _not quite there, _or _not quite somewhere else. _Heat from air inside melted stalactites into drips from the ceiling . Kit moved forward, lightsaber out of the lines of defense.

"Jedi are never to attack." Mara Jade said in her clear voice. She held her hands her head, her red lightsaber droning. Chunks of rock and ice fell from above and did not move from the natural affectations of gravity. Mara Jade threw shards and hunks of this materiel at Kit and he deflected them back or away closing all the time. her saber was held only in her left hand now so its swing down began in an obvious jerk, and Kit didn't bother to deflect it because her free hand was curling into a fist, and the Force said _now_!

Lightning erupted from her fingertips. Bedrock cracked with noise like a handclap, and loose rock and drops of water rained down for just a second, a second in which Kit saw she expected him to go for her open side.

He flipped forward, to her right, and now gravity did the work and her pause had doomed Mara Jade, because it took her longer for her victory-clouded mind to register surprise than it took for the first great piece of ceiling to come down and bring an entire section of the cavern roof with it. The lightning died in a shattering fall of rock and smoky detritus.

Kit saw the pit beneath him now, burnished smooth wall stained green and blue and rust, with smooth, dark water below and she shadow-reality of a catwalk and clone troopers above him. Kit felt a gut-wrenching fear, his hearts out of rhythm as he fell, but in his mind there was only blankness, and conditioning.

He caught the edge of an intake pipe an inch around and locked both hands to it, and the blur of vertigo ended with his knees thumping against the wall and the muscles in his shoulders and the back of his arms burning like fire. The Force eased the fire, and Kit looked down and knew that to drop to the water below was to drop into the past. Reality had lines in it, cracks from a great white hole centering _herenow _far away, and one of these cracks was between the realities separated in Kit Fisto's mind on one far, far away Empire Day.

This is what the Force had been leading him into all this time.

This choice; to remain and live, or return and die.


	33. Mustafar

_A/N: Woot! Figured out how to make accents. Snrk. _

_This chapter gets into some fun episode three stuff. Thanks be to Master Frodo Baggins, who read this massive story because I told him I needed recent reviews. _

**T**here was a room in the Destroyer Darth Vader rode where the walls were painted black, and on the floor there was a ring of staggered light, a hologram projector that could produce an image with dimensions measured in meters. Vader stood before this and waited, returning his thoughts to the image of his son, a man, looking at him with the eyes of two worlds.

His son. That had been the feeling then, the sudden convergence of time and the Force when above the new-formed Death Star the last X-wing shredded into fire. That one that now rested, in the deepest holding cell of the _Gryphon_, had been hidden with Padmé...

No, that was going _too _far. The present --

The present was that Darth Vader had killed his son. And that now, in an improbability among improbabilities, this _Luke_ had returned. Had become existent, so that Vader would have to kill him again, this time feeling everything without ignorance, without the anger and self-righteousness that had sustained him on Mustafar.

The holoprojector activated, and crackle became a stooped human form, a man clothed in gray and leaning on a shining black staff. This was the Emperor of the known galaxy, and Darth Vader bowed to him, one knee on the floor and his black cape falling around him like a pool. He could not feel the edges of material touch his cyborg arms.

'Lord Vader." The emperor crisply spoke. "Your arrival should be imminent."

"Yes, my master." And no secrets could be kept from Palpatine. "One of their...Jedi is with them. He is my son."

The emperor laughed; reedy, low, penetrating sounds. His mouth twisted into an ugly half smile. "Everything is falling into place. The machines in the alternate reality acted precisely as predicted."

Vader knew some of these plans, but truly did not care. For what would the Empire want with other universes...there was something disturbing to him about the emperor with his aspirations being closer to another reality than to the far-away galaxies around them in this one. More reason to destroy the emperor when his chance came...an opportunity he had been waiting for so long...

Palpatine continued. "Allowing this young Jedi to move from his universe was unavoidable. Now he may be used as an asset;if not as an ally than as an example." He spoke the last words with somewhat of a slow relish.

_Always manipulating_, thought Darth Vader. Many an analogy had been made to call the emperor a dejarik master, with the board the galaxy.

The universe?

Vader himself knew the events clearly. Luke Skywalker was his son--his life destroyed Padmé's life--and lived for her when she was long dead from weakness and...he did not wish to kill his son, not if the dark side could save him.

"Yes, my master." said Darth Vader. His breathing hissed out and in, uncontrollable despite the place where Anakin Skywalker felt once his lungs, and perhaps his heart, had been.


	34. Had Abbadon

_**Chapter 34: Had Abbadon **_

_Luke...Luke...Luke..._

The voice was without form, without _word_, and it called to his essence-self though it knew not what it did.

Thus, Master Skywalker knew he was ready.

He stood up, and there was crystallized fire in his eyes. The stormtroopers at the door pointed blasters at his chest and gestured for him to come out of the narrow cell the Imperials had placed him in aboard _Bitter Heart. _Darth Vader had instructed them to not bother taking Luke's lightsaber, because he would not use it.

They led him to a Lambda shuttle, dark inside, that curved over the capital ship from whence it emerged and began to descend toward the planet below...

Had Abbadon's eastern hemisphere was a tan forest of rock broken at times to reveal black strata, and streams ran through this maze and smoke rose from cracks that showed a violent sub-surface. There were a few man-made landing pads, often at the tops of spires of rock with stairways spiraling down them to disappear into caves of canyons. The hemisphere opposite was less rocky, maybe less blighted, with vegetation and animal life of its own. An atmosphereless moon made with a few bubbles of shield into an inhabitable meeting place floated beside the skeletal remains or beginnings of a Death Star.

The Lambda settled on one of the spires, and Luke walked out and descended the railless stairs in the company of two stormtroopers and with the attitude of a warrior assessing his enemies' prowess, which he was. Had Abbadon was some secret canter of the Empire, focusing point of the dark side of the Force as Coruscant was for political power. It was this universe's Vjun...or did Vjun have importance here as well?  
Luke cleared his thoughts of all this, and calmed his rushing thoughts at the base of the stairs. Ahead was an open place, and beyond it a door of thick metal. Beyond this was the emperor, and Luke had decided that Palpatine much die.

_No, not by my hands..._

No, it would have to be Vader again, because this time maybe there would be a chance for more than minutes of rediscovered good. Luke shifted the black cloak about his shoulders, feeling the chill wind of this thin-aired world attempt to work into his bones. it had been years since Luke had gone against at evil like that of the emperor, or faced such a dire mental and physical challenge. He did not doubt himself, because he could not doubt the Force. The troopers opened the black door.

The first impressions were of red-tan rock, heat, and black strips of metal lighting marching toward the apex of the room, and there at that apex sat a throne, and within that throne sat Palpatine of the Empire. Darth Vader stood beside him like a pillar of onyx, silent, only the dark side filling his mind. The room was small, smaller than the Emperor's Quarters on the Death Star, filled with a fiery warmth that banished the chill outside. This heat though was no less natural. A river of lava, pure as if diverted here for only the purpose of intimidation, ran from the left and in a fall obscured by the walkway above it plunged into a pit so deep it was dark, splashed by random reflections of fire. The Emperor's chair sat on a balcony above them almost mirroring the Death Star spire, the shadows under the metal, corrugated stairway concealing cave formations of stalagmites growing unsmoothed. The stormtroopers had not entirely silently turned and marched away. Tan rock walls rose in all directions. Luke saw this all and turned his gaze back to the Emperor, calm, unfathomable.

"Welcome, young Skywalker." said the emperor, a trace of a laugh in his voice, a much more than a trace of arrogance on his ruined, hooded face. "I have been expecting you."

_What must Darth Vader think of all this? This place..._

_I've been expecting you._

"That is as it should be." The Force said through Luke, quietly, humbly.

"You have walked into your dying place, Jedi." Palpatine snapped, anger seeming a part of the pale, yellow eyes and wrinkled, curving hands. He stood with the force of his anger, then became passive again, folding his hands into his robes. "If you do not see the power of the dark side."

Luke allowed himself a smile, a quirk. "I have turned from the dark path many times before." The Force brought his hand of durasteel and wiring to the hilt of his lightsaber, to end the life of an Evil One without rage or personal wish.

It is uncertain, to the scientists and theologians, whether the Force can be surprised or whether indeed it should be personified to presume such. A wise Jedi once said, _we speak of the will of the Force as someone ignorant of gravity might say it is the will of a river to flow to the ocean._

All this aside, Luke, as immersed in the Force as he was, was surprised at what the emperor said next.

Palpatine laughed, a haughtily hollow sound. "You believe so easily in your _arcane_ knowledge." The emperor scoffed, turning his back on Luke., manipulating the fingertip controls of the throne. He looked back for just a moment, the fearsomely withered face floating between the black of cowl and cloaked shoulder." And your arrogance reeks of the dark side."

Luke waited, knowing his rightness with the tiniest nibble of wonder that certainty itself was wrong, a lifetime telling him it was not.

The emperor turned around slowly with a universe-spanning machine in his hands, its tail twined about his shrouded arms.


	35. How To Wreck a Death Star, pt 1

**TAS 35! How To Wreck A Death Star, pt. 1**

**A/N: Thanks be to the reviewers, especially MFB and LiMiYa. This one's to Mr. George Lucas, who also understands the challenge of writing multiple endings at once.**

Their progress had taken them to the edge of the canyons and the beginnings of the plains, and Han Solo had reflected, for not the first time, that Imperials went for _quantity_, not _quality. _

Massive mechanical weapons walked the snow outside, and explosions plumed about snowspeeders and the ion cannon and the figures of unevenly dressed Rebels digging themselves into the snow, running, shouting and shooting and falling, occasionally not to get up again. Han's own squad rushed to join a shallowly entrenched force of their companions covering the launching of the few snowspeeders in need of last-minute repair. Han stood with commlink in hand, buzzing with the lost, quickly cut signal of Paqs Patra. It cut out to silence punctuated with chaos, and Han dug through his memory to where he had stored the old codes, shortbanded free information at the time, on how exactly to destroy a Death Star.

"Chewie!" Han shouted, and the Wookiee looked up over the barrel of his bowcaster, fur tangled with snow, lips parted to show the impressively understated fangs. "I'm goin' back to the ship! Cover this crowd until somebody decides to stop messing up killing us..." and he turned and began to run for the base's entrance, tucking his blaster and commlink back in their places and pulling his fur-lined coat around his slowly freezing self.

**P**aqs Patra could see Hoth at a distance, and the asteroid belt the other way on the same relative plane, and the Death Star between them impossibly huge, with its own shadow.

Much more important was the TIE fighter directly ahead of them, weaving in and out of targeting circles, its engines wailing, and then that one wasn't important anymore because claws depressed triggers and two guns fired into the TIE's aft, and with his wingtip grasping claws Patra slued the _Orion_ onto another course, another horizon, and there was another TIE like to the first.

_To many. _Patra had time to think.  
They did not want to be here. Something made them long for the homeworld, where you could feel your feet clutch the cool ground and exchange death there if you liked, within no space at all between yourself and your enemy.

Another TIE, skewered through the center by neat-, pin-point lasers, drifted dead in space. Patra's mind located in the head whose cheek feathers now stood straight in excitement worked in blink-speed, pushing their body's reflexes to spin and orient the ship, to line up targets the computer could not handle, because;

"There's too many of them!" Someone's voice over the Rebel squadron's comm channel, opening up a wave of shouts and breathy expressions.

"Blue six, I've got that one."

"Aye, two, watch ten-nil-beta,"

"Got it-gaah!"

"Two's battered--"

Patra stabbed their comm control. "Cut the comm chatter an' try to stay alive until Solo comes through with the codes."

Double clicks; approval from the nine of them. The three other squadrons, with Patra leading all of them, had nine or ten X-wings apiece; forty against a fleet. Corran Horn had given Patra this information--that if what he 'shakily sensed' was correct, Han Solo was present, and he had the coordinates for a strike by a single X-wing down a open shaft on the Death Star that would utterly destroy the battle station, provided they gave Corran the time he needed to take the station's shields down.

Three determining factors; three people that must have success.

Three TIE fighters angling toward Patra--his smaller self caught them and tuned in the larger, so that again his six hands flew over the controls. They looped away, back again on the enemy's tail, blew two of them apart in a sweeping strafe that gave the third time to come around below them--an X-wing tore through that one, chased by another, that Patra disintegrated between breaths. The X-wing barrel-rolled, possibly a salute more probably a resetting and desertion of the trajectory that was just now streaming into Patra's computer as a hot zone; one of the Star Destroyers moving into position to take out a heavily-populated area of Hoth-ward space.

Flurry of battle took over both of his _selves _again.


	36. Smiling As The Plot Goes By

_chapter 37: Smiling As The Plot Goes By_

_Kit smiles, Boba just curses at it in Mandalorian..._

Corran Horn's boots clicked on the dark floor of the Death Star, and this sound floated into the silence with crisp finality. A narrow shaft ran perpindicular to a lighted hallway, a catwalk led through it and out to the other side, and Corran's hand waved in front of the eye-pieces of two stormtrooper's helmets, his mind telling them that he had every right, every possible reason, to be here.

"I have access to this control surface."

Just a look at his uniform had them agreeing, even wondering why he hadn't assumed it, and Corran moved past them to a circular control console.

He got a surprise; it _was _as easy as pulling a lever that said 'Main Shield'. He could have done it from his station--apparently Darth Vader had given him access codes a-plenty, because they were in his recent but not his past memory--but it would have been a ring harder to convince a roomful of Imperials that what he was doing was good for them.

The lever clunked into its downward position; a row of red light points flickered off. Corran checked his position with the Force and moved again, forsaking the shadows for the confidant march of an Imperial officer within the safety of his people's greatest triumph.

**A**ll instinct, and more pressing than this, all training, told Kit Fisto to jump back to normalcy. But below, there, that was the _past_, and though he'd never thought it, the past has a way of calling you to dwell there.

To go back? To live--and die--in the world that called to him? He balanced on the edges of a knife blade and did not know it.

To stay _here _and continue in _this _fight? _Here _the company was better, the galaxy slightly more stable, and the combat less imminent.

And the former two greatly outweighed the unfortunate latter.

Kit Fisto pulled himself up, gave a smile to the past, and jumped straight vertical.

He landed on the surface of the floor slicked with melt, and got his hand to his lightsaber in seconds. One clash, an overhead parry, a second strike, thruumm, quick visual of wild-eyed Mara Jade with her hair all around her face, another line open and not wuick enough covered. Kit stepped back and away, switched his upper hand on the cool ridged metal of his lightsaber, and slid the plasma blade into Mara Jade just below the breastbone. For a moment the dark side colored the woman's eyes, then her face went blank. He retracted the lightsaber, a slight sadness touching the Force to him as the exstacy of Form I faded. The dark Jedi fell to her knees and lay, face down on the ice. Kit Fisto gave her a minute bow, touching one heavy hand to his forhead, and then he turned and smoothly ran from the room, back to the corridors.

Beside the dead, the great pit faded without sound back into its truth in the past.


	37. Watchersbane Defeated

_A/N: **guest reader**_,_thanks for catching the voxyn/vornskr thing. I knew the difference, but seem to have not bothered it while also constructing that chase. :)_

Slowly, shuttles moved between Maw Installation and Republic capitol ships. Star Destroyers and Mon Cal frigates were lashed to bug fighters by durasteel and plastic umbilicals clamped down directly on the fighter's split cockpits. They had caught the little fighters unawares, or chasing the _Orion _with a fanaticism that only Master Kell could truly comprehend. Testing was done on the surly, mixed-species pilots, and their blood ran free with glitterstim while their minds ran Force-lines and their eyes slowly rolled up into white. They originated somewhere in the vicinity of the legal Kessel mining base, and wouldn't talk until the spice ran down.

Inside the station, Paqs Patra, Kell and De'shar of the Republic followed the Jedi in a path she traced with head high and nostrils pulling at the air in gulps. Nothing showed that she also swam in the currents of the Force. De'shar could almost still feel that...coordination, something between the pieces of her mind and the whole of Kell's, at the fringes of her skillless reaching.

"He went this way." Kell said quietly. Patra looked dubious, as much as his long face with its feathers tucked below the dark eyes could be said to have expression. De'shar kept her gaze between them. She wouldn't have been even this enthusiastic about rescuing Corran before, but some of her grudge against the Jedi had faded away, replaced somewhat by her brush with the psychic bond. And would it fade when that remnant did? She couldn't say. She felt not quite a new being, but more that the distinction between herself, the body inhabiting her boots and holding her blaster, and the other's varied forms was at a different level than that between their thoughts. There was a certainty that Patra and Master Kell were thinking in the same way as herself.

It wasn't true entirely; she couldn't say what it was that made Kell stop at a particular door and stand, the tips of her tails loosely waving below her cloak, before keying the door open.

Inside, the machine lay on the near table of a laboratory. Kel picked it up with one hand while De'shar circled around and eyed it beside her. This indeed was what they had come to secure.

"So this is what you've been all about." Patra said levelly.

Kell said, "Hmm." and turned the silver sphere over in her hands.

"If you go after him there's no way for you to come back either." De'shar said.

"I know." said Kell, minutely terse. "But if Luke is in that same universe, together they may find a way here."

"And if they're not?"

Kell shook her head and snorted, anger in her eyes.

Patra had maneuvered himself into a metal chair, his legs folded back beneath him and his tail between the struts in the back so he looked like a brooding bird. "What does the Force tell you?"

This gave Kell pause. "That...that they are alive and that we can do nothing but wait." But she muttered, "It doesn't feel right." and crouched down beside the table, the palms of her hands flat on the floor. De'shar wondered what it would be like to feel the world through scales, wondered if the Lizz-Sur was a bit like herself and knew how hard it was to comfort, and leaned her back against the wall beside the door. "Now", she said, quiet because she thought she had heard it before, "we wait."


	38. Guardians of the Trenchrunner

Chapter 38: Guardians of the Trenchrunner

Alone, cold and for the first time in a while doing something he didn't have a bad feeling about, Han Solo gripped a hard wire-case strut for just a moment and veritably flung himself into his ship's pilot's seat. Admittantly, the lack of bad feeling was probably due to the fact that there was to much adrenaline running inside him, to much cold to be burst though without, but this was feeling more like a flight thrill than an absolutely insane attempt to 'save the galaxy'.

He glanced sideways at the computer layout, then brought up a flatscreen display and began to read through records. A scowl and a twist of a dial; there it was, the few years' back Rebel briefing, and there was the schematic spies had died for. He shrugged off sour old guilt and made to start the engines.

Footsteps clattered on the ramp. Han stood up and shouted; "Who's there?"

Quicker than logic dictated Kit Fisto appeared at the cockpit hatch, his shoulders heaving. Han hesitated.

"Thanks for the ride." Kit said without invitation, and slid into the seat behind Han's.

Han took the opportunity to get back to his preparations, silently admiring the Nautolan's style, and a few seconds later the boarding ramp folded back into its place and blue drives melted the raw ice of Echo Base's floor. The _Falcon _soared out the gigantic entranceway and turned diagonal to move through the canyons.

"Dark Jedi." Kit said, either for explanation or in exasperation, after a moment.

"Well, that seems to have been taken care of." Han brought the ship down near the Rebel's entrenched position, scattering troops from both sides. Kit got up with a weary but bright smiling look and left without hesitation. Han bellowed, "Chewie!" and the Wookiee's answering roar came through clearly. Han leaned back in his chair, laced his hands behind his neck, and kicked the lever that switched the dual lasers into cockpit control. Chewbacca ducked the doorframe and growl-muttered something; Han said, "Well buddy, some days are like that." while refiring the drives.

Like this, Chewbacca sarcastically asked, complete with breaking-down speeders, snowblindness, and stormtroopers?

"Yes." Han said. "Some days."

"You're good to go." Corran Horn looked up from the gara-katte cockpit and eased the ship out of the Death Star's main bay, guiding it in first two steps and then rocketing out of the bay shields. Outside was a flurry. Somewhere out there was Paqs Patra, and all around before Corran's eyes and senses were fights to the death between TIE fighters and Rebel X-wings, patched-together uglies, or freighters. He avoided the bursts of lasers and twisting trajectories of spacecraft that his flyer's instinct painted as sure as any navicomp system; this was not his destination any more.

_Get there quick, trenchrunner._

Whoever was going to attempt this stunt was no Luke Skywalker, but he sure should be. All Rebel hopes, again, rested on the fact that even after the victorious Battle of Yavin and its discovered agenda the trench vents had not been well protected. Imperial cockiness, Corran scoffed. The gara-katte made full speed for atmosphere.

It was Luke he was seeking now, he on whom the Maw Installation mission rested, while he pleaded that the Force would keep the team safe. He cared for all of them more than he thought he did...even rude De'shar had some charm about her when she was in imminent danger.

Luke was nowhere. To far away, or too long dead, he could not tell which. But another Force-signature glimmered on the plains of the planet below, where his scopes and blurry memory said Echo Base should be, so he angled toward it.


	39. The Forever Now

"Surprise." The Emperor croaked, handling the word and cracking it, splitting it as if to reveal the dark side of the very language.

Luke tensed all over, like a shiver ran through him, as Vader's adamant mask turned toward them. Spurred on by the image of the sphere, possibilities flooded and assailed Luke's Force-conscious mind; the madness of this universe could _spread _and the splintering Force fail to find it, and here in this challenge was the endgame. The first time's failure hung over his head like a dark cloud, but now Luke felt stronger and knew more, knew tens of ways to wound a man body and spirit without killing him, so maybe this time would be same/different with another chance...

The Emperor kept speaking, looking down at Luke with his yellow gaze unfocused. "It is _I _who have the control of all that has transpired. I _allowed _there insignificant rebels to take their positions, because this entire universe will be as _nothing _when there are no Jedi left to defend it!"

Quietly, Luke said, "Kit still lives."

The Emperor gave a jagged smile. "Master Fisto and I are old acquaintances. I am sure dealing with him will be no trouble."

Luke showed his teeth for a second, looked around, felt the Force and the past--what is the difference?--and pivoted.

Many things happened at once. Luke called the universe-machine to his right hand and his lightsaber to his left. The Emperor kept his grip on the machine with hands as pale and curled as Dagoban spiders and the lightsaber hilt fit perfectly against Luke's palm, and Darth Vader lunged from his place at the apex of the stairs with his red lightsaber growing into a horizontal preparation for attack. Heat beat against the rough walls and made the air thick, so that it was breathed in as well as pushed against black clothing from without.

The Emperor laughed, spreading into the Force arrogance and sour amusement.

Luke didn't bother with the failure of his telekinesis; it was part of the plan. He took the lightsaber in both hands and twirled it, then threatened the Emperor with the lime-green terminal curve. He noticed that he nearly matched the stooped ruler in height. The old man raised his free hand in a claw, tucking the machine against his shrouded side and hissing like a cornered animal with jagged yellow-gray teeth. Luke turned from him and met his father's lightsaber in a horizontal overhead block to a bone-shivering two-handed swing. Maybe something in Luke's eyes told of a sinking, falling utterly different than the negative depth of the dark side, and maybe it was a reflected shadow in the focused clear blue.

"Kill him." The Emperor said, lazily.

Luke back down the steps, watching, and once every moment or so they would trade strikes. Vader was silent, malevolent, a force unto himself. Attacks came slow and purposeful, and Luke blocked them easily with exaggerated twists, precisely crackling strikes, and the growing awareness of the will of the Force.

Both stepped onto the rock of the lower level at the same time, while Palpatine settled back into his throne. Quick as thought--slow as the human mind--Darth Vader gestured and tore molten rocks from the sluggish river of lava beside and behind Luke. They arced toward him and he did not bother to dodge but flowed with the Force, letting the molten drops these missiles trailed splash against him if that was their natural direction, because they only scored holes in his dark uniform and made tiny heat against his skin that he could surrender unto the Force as easily as he could keep his breath even and deep while heavy lightsaber blows continued to rain down. A flaming stone arched across Luke's left shoulder and fell to the floor to his right; another flipped across the floor toward his ankles. Luke moved with the Force and the fist-sized missile took another course toward Darth Vader. The Sith sent it back, and for a moment their hands almost met with the cooling stone suspended between them, skintone synthskin against black leather hiding golden circuitry, before Vader fisted his hand and the rock shattered, and more were flying at Luke from all sides along with streams and gouts of fire. He disengaged from the lightsaber fight in a violent sweep that deactivated his blade and flowed into a shoulder roll that took him nearly underneath the simple steps. Shadows fell over his face; molten fire pocked and colored the stairway neon as Darth Vader paced forward.


	40. The AU Advantage

_Chapter 40: The AU Advantage_

_In an AU, you can do things like have Kit Fisto versus an AT-AT...Thanks a lot to all the people who have stuck with this 'fic so long. You're brave and persistent and make me feel loved. Luke thinks he has a plan, but it's really the Force's..._

The snowfields of Hoth reminded Kit Fisto of the red and dusty plains of Geonosis in the midst of war; great animal-shape machines plodded and rained destruction down on orderly, running and dying men. But the color of things was white snow, white cloud, white armor and gray mammoth walkers. Gray sky. Red blood. The Rebels were dressed in whatever they had, so it was dull rainbow streetclothes with patchy armor and patchier weapons. Green skin. The air smelled of metal, water, ozone-ion, and blood-heat.

Kit jogged past the friendly emplacements, where Bade the Kel Dor leaned up out of a trench with a T-21 repeating blaster, keeping stormtroopers and two-legged walkers off his makeshift field hospital. The ion cannon the Jedi had...reactivated the generators for pumped deadly energy into AT-ATs, with young Raylsk still at it's bunker-shielded controls.

For a moment Kit kneeled down just beside Bade, the Force cascading around like it had since the time he closed his eyes for seconds on the _Millennium Falcon_. It had given nearly everything back; he let it spill down into the trench without thinking about it.

Bade looked up into the sky for a second. "No reinforcements. Yet."

"The Bothans spoke of them?"

"Aye."

"Bade, tell the gunners to leave me an AT-AT."

"Ah, yes sir."

Kit Fisto grinned. "Good reply."

The Empire had a Destroyer's load of ground troops, ten AT-PTs and four AT-ATs, plus the occasional feline machine nicknamed AT-AR, the gara-katte. The Rebels had about one, two hundred ground troops, one ion cannon, fifteen working snowspeeders, and one Jedi Master.

There was an AT-AT making its slow way toward the ion cannon, the plated head dipping to track speeders that fired uselessly at the heavy round feet. Kit came beside it as a foot stomped down and the speeders peeled off. No Imperial mind turned toward him. Behind the arch of the walker's underside and back legs that even now shifted, swinging one foot forward, a snowspeeder fishtailed around an AT-AP and shot the legs from under it. The cockpit crumpled backwards; Kit felt the pilots burst confidence outside, scream, but soldier's resolve remain. The Rebel would have to finish them as they lay, and he did, and hated himself.

This story of personality was the precursor to the plunge. In memory of the great focusing point of the Temple--

--the Force took him. His consciousness _became _the AT-AT, its metal skin and synthetic fluid blood, the snow at his feet, the wind that slid over the sensitive surface of the top of his head. It erases the "yourself" that was capable of hurting, thinking and worrying about the passage of time, and it offers you your strengths with infinite energy-possibility behind them.

The complex, tiny mechanisms of Kit's grappling hook had been ruined in water weeks ago, but the principle worked. he got the hook to catch the walker's first leg joint, the knee ten meters up, and the tension held just a moment before--

The walker's foot picked up, and Kit jumped with it. He climbed the joist quickly. The legs were very thin compared to the rest of the machine, and therefor about twice the Jedi's own width. The leg swayed under his feet and the rope chafed his tired hands as he pulled. He reached the knee and the foot came down with a shudder and thud of compressed, snow-packed ground.

He dug into the shallow handholds of the leg joint and threw the grapple again. This time it caught on just a planned wrinkle in the walker's vertical skin, and Kit pushed away from the leg before he could think enough to fear the possibilities.

Quick visual of snow flying beneath his feet in an arc, then -now- and the grapple line went slack, the hook slipping off its dangerous purchase. Kit backflipped _up _with the momentum of the swing and landed on hands and feet on top of the walker's head unit where the frigid metal was flat, and the Imperials with their slitted viewscreen were still unaware of her existence. He could feel himself shivering, dressed still in his Jedi's robes from inside the station and with bare head and hands. The wind blew beside the sounds of shouts, deep engine growls, laser shrieks. In another step that smoothly propelled the head forward the walker stepped closer to Raylsk's ion cannon, and Kit moved in a crouch toward the back of the giant head.

The rubbery substance of the neck, similar to that used in a ship's umbilical, contained among other things the rerouting "brain" of the walker, less a droids' motivator/servobrain than a speeder's transmission, though more like in structure to the former. Kit Fisto had never been trained in the mechanics of these, but the Force bound him to the various mechanisms and spoke of their importance. He came to the nape of the neck and activated his lightsaber, than spiked the black down into the metal. Sparks skittered around the breachpoint and pressures pulled at the blade as he sheared it through and out the side of the neck. With all communications severed, gyros and legs left to their own devices and gravity's whims, the great metal body began to fall.

Kit retracted and resecured the lightsaber as the walker head began to tilt down and forward, cold air still gaping empty to either side. The walker fell slow until gravity completely took the legs still completing their movements and had it trip itself, and then it met Hoth in a sliding crash. Kit moved from a low balanced stance into a Force-held fall. He landed a recovery roll right in front of the two Imperials, one human officer and an armored snowtrooper, who argued over their controls being alive and their transport very dead and beginning to accumulate snow around its lower edges as the plumes settled.

Kit activated his lightsaber again, for the drama and fun of it. Let the enemy know what they were up against, though said Jedi was exhausted, his hands rope- and ice-burned and gills reflexively gasping, aching. He savored the fear from the AT-AT and did not let it touch him.

The Imperials called for reinforcements. Another AT-AT, one of three, began to stride in that direction where they had just seen one of their number utterly incapacitated by one man--that is, one alien.

Imagine their surprised then, their added fear and shaken confidence, when a gara-katte came out of the sky and crouched, and despite the allied craft the one that came out was a second and fresh Jedi, weilding a red lightsaber.


	41. How To Wreck a Death Star, pt 2

41: How To Wreck A Death Star, pt. 2

Paqs Patra did not have much experience with large-scale space battles; their was a lonely occupation as far as vacuum was concerned. Their extend of comparison stopped with the disastrous skirmish, if it could be called that, over Dagobah. Now they had been assigned to the Rebel's motly blue squadron, composed of eight pilots they did not know, a Bothan leader named Dan Ten'dla, and Blue Two, the trench-runner that rumor said was one of their youngest spacers.

The Death Star was backdrop to a hundred battles. TIE fighters chased X-Wings ripping a the aether. X-Wings twisted almost back over themselves, dodging and sending biting lasers back at the flood of opposition. Freighters and retrofitted passenger ships flirted with the two remaining Star Destroyers' turbolaser banks. No one knew whether the Death Star would fire on Hoth, and the question hung over all their heads.

_Millenium Falcon _had fallen up into the battle with a vengence, and after the minimal of traded quips Han and Patra had been serious, almost stoic. Patra knew that the Corellian felt something deep for his Jedi friend--something not everyone got out of the elusive smuggler. The _Falcon _could be seen as one of the hardiest dealers in death that space-splashed afternoon.

_Orion _swung around the Death Star's equator in close company with Blue Leader and Blue Two, all scopes keeping their winged body's mind digesting strategy and chance. They were clear of enemies for now because Patra, unofficial second-in-command, had assigned the rest of Blue Squadron to guard.

The horizon flattened out, and the two battered X-Wings dipped into the trench now whipping past Patra as they made for their first goal; destruction of the two largest anti-strafing lasers along the midpoint of the trench. A TIE fighter spun into the black textured surface of the death Star and an X-Wing plowed into the resultant fireball after it, chanced in turn by a TIE Interceptor intent on chewing up the Rebel's aft shields with red laser. Fear gripped Patra's larger brain--_fight_ companions in danger!--even as the winged mind used their hands to align targeting reticules over the gun turrets _Orion _was swinging toward. But the Interceptor was the one that followed its wingmate into the battle station's surface and the X-Wing cleared the metal trailing fire, and soared back into the sterile chaos of space.

**It **was Sidi Driss's first battle, though he knew his X-Wing's controls like the back of his hand. Better, because it seemed that every day the back of his hand, not to mention the rest of him, got another scar. His skin had paled since Tatooine.

Luke Skywalker had called him aside a few days before this morning's fighter-scrambling, when the young near-human had stood in line for assignation, nervous, dressed in uniformish orange, his dented and repainted helmet under his right arm.

"Sidi." said the Jedi.

"Sir?" He hadn't known Skywalker knew he existed.

"I want you to take point on the trench run."  
Sidi gaped. "Me? Commander Jedi, I'm a rookie--"

"And I have chosen you. The Force is with you, Sidi Driss. Trust it." A smile hovered around Skywalker's scarred face. "Then you will be the success of all of us." Skywalker turned away, and Sidi put on a brave face because he had no idea what to say.

He stammered, "An' may the Force be with you, sir."

Skywalker bowed his head and came up with a brilliant smile. "It is, Sidi."

It had been an honor and a thrill, and now as the numbers counted down meters that fairly flew, confidence ran in his veins. Meanwhile, the less adrenaline-fueled parts of his brain said that there was no way he could do this without the Force or a miracle, and no Jedi hero had granted him a miracle. Already one of his wingmates had had to save him from a being more than 'battered' by a trio of TIEs.

Metal-patterned walls flashed around him.

"Steady up." Blue Leader's voice came. Sidi's hands tightened on the sticks. 41095. Gunbursts flew from ships outside the trench and his wingmates rose to take out turrets along the sheer edges. 32718. He had never been so nervous, not so determined that determination became a clarity, a grim tensing.

_Why me?_ he felt young, and growing older every moment. 30005.

_Because I'm supposed to be able to use the Force._

So he tried to sort of...think of how to think into another dimension. In no way did it work.

"Good luck, Two." The pilot of the _Orion_, only non-X-Wing craft of the squadron, peeled off from his protecting position above the trench. 25701.

Sidi felt sweat under the targeting interface arm next to his temple, felt it in his shades-of-brown hair. His thought ran generally thus; _I can't do this. Shoulder's stayed home on the dunes. 20035. I don't use the Force._

And there came a voice, ethereal, almost inside him, something like a mix of Commander Skywalker's voice and his own; **"No. Let the Force use _you_."**

17223...He thought he might have felt a...everything.

Commchatter broke the white noise of dogfights careening overhead and console readings beeping. "Coming up..."

"Steady..."

"Izzat reinforcements, Leader?"

"Can't be. Not ours."

11380...

The numbers blurred. Sidi could tell when he coupled with a _power_, a force, that with him retracted the targeting computer and fired proton torpedoes away that with the X-Wing's slightest angling dove into the targeted shaft. It stayed with him in the full-forward tile that rocketed him away from the Death Star. It left him to sigh enormously, slap his hands again his thighs, close his eyes, think _Thank the Force!_. Momentary shock when the ship jolted, then he saw the tractor beam from the _Orion _had caught him and some of his squadmates and pulled them out into space, while further away below--

The Death Star magnificently, neatly, exploded. The station became yellow vapor, white sparks and boiling flame and a fiery particulate ring. Shouts and whoops burst into the Rebel comms, and Sidi joined them. In blue reflective light they flew toward home.


	42. Random Reflections of Fire

_The meaning of life is forty-two, you know...This chappie has to be dedicated to Ryder Windham, the dude whose novelization enabled me to copy the important part of the script of _Return of the Jedi_. Thanks. To **Arya**; an AU is a storyline that goes somewhere different than the actual storyline of the, in these cases _Star Wars_, movies and books go. You'll have to read more to find out who the "bounty hunter" is... _

_Chapter 42: Random Reflections of Fire_

**I**n the shadows of Had Abbadon, Luke conferred with the Force and the universe-spanning machine. The rust-colored rock around him caught Darth Vader's scarlet lightsaber and reflected it on Luke's face, outlining tension. But this was the place, and now was the time, so Luke fell into the Force that crackled, fuzzed, and told him to work the machinery in _this _way, so that it affected the world in ways it had never really been meant to...

Fueled by the Force, utterly without fear, Luke composed himself and waited. He picked a leg up to ease the muscles' strain, put it back down, scraped his right shoulder against the rough rock. But he did not much notice all this, because he was in the Force, and the Force was manipulating the universe-machine, moving the louvers and moving the insides, moving the possibilities. For just a second he was not surprised, because the Force and its result the timeline of the world had not caught up with him.

Luke said, firmly, "I will not fight you."

Darth Vader's voice rumbled as he paced, carefully formed the bass of the words. "Give yourself to the dark side. It is the only way you can save your friends. " Pause. Luke could feel the metal catwalk beneath his feet, in the narrow place below the Emperor's balcony. Vader spoke slowly. "Yes, your thoughts betray you. Your feelings for them are strong. Especially for...sister! So, you have a twin sister!" His voice had gone exultant. Luke felt cold in the pit of his stomach, cold dread. "Your feelings have now betrayed her, too. Obi-Wan was wise to hide her from me. Now, his failure is complete. If you will not turn to the dark side, than maybe _she_ will."

Leia, down on Endor! But no...that was the past (/present). He knew he was his _present _self, and there was the real present on the edges of his vision, gray-silver metal meeting dark red stone. _So this is what the machine has done, so this is the Unifying Force--this was part of that plan all along. _It was like he had known the future but would not reveal it to his conscious mind. He let the fear and anger take him--Darth Vader would not destroy Leia's life (/again)!

"No!" He jumped from hiding and the two lightsaber caught together, hissing, and now it was Luke who drove Darth Vader back with strikes both swift and hard. They fought to the bridge over the innards of the Death Star, Luke feeling more raw power every moment. Vader weakened and fell when Luke could almost feel his blood boiling, and a surgically precise cut took the Sith Lord's left hand from his wrist and revealed not muscle and bone beneath, but leather and wire.

The Emperor crowed form his throne. "Good! Your hate has made you powerful. Now, fulfill your destiny and take your father's place at my side!"

Wide-eyed, Luke flexed his right hand as if the gloved synthskin and circuits were not his own. In memory and conscious present he thought; I will not become like my father. Like Darth Vader.

"Never." He threw his lightsaber away with a flick of his wrist of flesh and the weapon clattered away into the darkness. "I'll never turn to the dark side. You've failed, Your Highness. I am a Jedi, like my father before me."

Hatred perfectly matched the etched scars in Palpatine's face. The Luke of the real, alternate present could sense that the wicked ruler _knew _of the deception, of the shift in "normal", but he too was caught up and could do nothing. Now his reedy voice spoke every slow word of threat dripping with relish and measured scorn. "So be it..._Jedi_."

Palpatine came down the stairs, black robes unfurling like wings. "If you will not be turned, you will be _destroyed_."

Present Luke knew what was coming. Past Luke did not. One body felt all the pain and could only partially divorce from it, when the blue forks of lightning poured from the Emperor's fingers.

Luke found himself thrown against railings and round outcroppings that _didn't actually exist_, the pain spiking, striking, crawling, creeping through him in jolts and spears.

Vader struggled up and moved... "Young _fool_. Only now, at the _end_, do you understand." That voice would haunt Luke's rare nightmares and waking hours' shadows. Pain...Luke shuddered and tried to dig his fingertips into the floor... "Your feeble skills are no match for the powers of the dark side! You have paid the price for your lack of _vision_!" ...the world smelled like lightning... "_Father,_ _please, _help _me!"_ Anguish. Blue in shades of blinding.

"Now, young Skywalker...you will die." Almost pity, false _evil _pity, in the Emperor's voice. Pain...a black movement and undulating scream as '_Vader threw the Emperor into the shaft the bridge spanned, taking the lightning that still branched from Palpatine's fingers to the human bone' _the pain, blessed Force, shut off.

Heat. Luke first noticed the heat when he returned quickly to normalcy, and then that the opening of the great lava pit was inches away where the steel railings had been. The sluggish lava in the pits base had begun to boil. Real replaced confusion replaced pain, and Luke staggered up and across the fire-beaten span of rock where Darth Vader lay. Again he fell by his father's side, the pain of final-seeming loss more than eclipsing lightning-burn. He knelt, put his hands over the fallen body and searched for a sigh of life in the forever dead metal eyes.

Vader said, electronic breath muted, "Luke...help me, take this mask off."

He didn't want to. Not again. But he did; with tears burning his eyes his hands found the release edges of the black helmet.

He had set the first curved plate aside when the freedom of present-reality was realized. He could no longer bound as a watcher in the Force! It could give him this chance...  
Luke took a breath, and dove into his father's spirit. The Force bade them mesh for a moment--images, others' memories, streamed past and into him but he paid no attention to them, and searched for the metaphysical cure to Anakin Skywalker's physical weakness. But then Luke felt a slight touch on his shoulder and focused, incredulous, on the mundane realms. _This chance--!_

Anakin was looking at him now through the black lenses, and his hand just brushed Luke's shoulder. _No._

Shock. "But you'll die!"

The Force said calm. Anakin said, "Nothing can stop that now. Just, for once, let me look on you...with my own eyes."

Like a droid, Luke unlatched the front portion of Vader's mask and laid it on the rock beside him. The ledge trembled as if with import. There again was the shriveled, pale face, red and blue ugly scars, blue eyes now sunken and almost colorless. Luke could almost feel nothing, but there was the double sorrow and he could not control or enjoy it. Why...?

Anakin might have smiled, and said, "Now go...my son. Leave...me."

"No! I have to save you." Luke's voice crackled.

"You already...have, Luke. You were right about me. Tell your sister, you were _right_..."and Anakin Skywalker's eyes closed for the last time.

For a moment Luke paused there, his forehead touching Anakin's dusty armor plating. He could feel the forces stirred, physical and psychic, by Emperor Palpatine's demise...but in so many ways they were nothing to his own pain.

Luke stood, climbed the stairs limping lightly and picked up the universe-machine from the emperor's throne. The Force secured his battered body as he came down the stairs again; he noticed the energy was flowing and healed as before. Luke felt strong, old, and as if a hole had been redug somewhere in his core. He retrieved his lightsaber from the edge of the lava river, where it almost burnt his hand, but physical pain could not touch him. He replaced the helmet that had given Anakin Skywalker his life for the past many years, because that had been how it had been. Luke left the cavern feeling tremors deep below the surface of the fire and rock where the emperor had fallen, and there was something like bitter triumph in his eyes.

He walked outside into the open cold. The sky, the high rocks, looked the same as before. The Imperial shuttle gleamed at the fringes of a small base beyond a collection of natural spires.

This then would (/again) be a funeral pyre; Luke found it ironic, bittersweet, yet perfect. Again they had both come out of the fire standing straight.

Luke could be seen now as a dark man standing in front of the tower of stone. He delved into the Force, and inside, the lava ran. The pit, stilled tinged with blue lightning, boiled and swelled.

The hollowed mountain erupted. Lava shot from the high apex in red and yellow shards of sparks, and then beneath this the black rock shell thinned and cracked and spilled. Luke stood with his head bent, hands folded under his arms, letting the heat wash over him.


	43. De Neumont

_Great thanks and appreciation to **LiMiYa**_

Chapter 43: De Neumont (the Falling Action)

"What ground forces remained fled when they saw the destruction in the sky." Kit Fisto leaned over a podium in the Rebel's briefing room, his head-tails falling around his shoulders, mildly smiling. "Our job is nowhere near done yet. Short-range fighters and even a Star Destroyer escaped our attack on the Death Star. The fight will continue and _we _are _ready_ for it to do so.

All of you performed brilliantly today. We're going to have a rest and a _celebration _tonight that you all deserve, and right now there's some people all of us need to thank." Kit grinned and gestured forward. He still felt excited and tired, a little shell-shocked and happy. "Paqs Patra, Han Solo, Bade, Sidi Driss and our Imperial contact Corran Horn!"

They came up the center isle between the rather unorganized half-circle ranks of Rebels. The smugglers looked sheepish, except the Wookiee to whom that adjective could not possibly apply. Bade and Raylsk wore clean, earthtone street clothes because their uniforms were so war-stained, and the Bothan had brushed her hair and fur. A new look, a beautiful and dangerous gleam, had grown in her violet-and-dark eyes since her time at the ion cannon. Sidi Driss wore one of the oil-splashed but resplendent for it orange flightsuits Luke and Kit had called up out of the aether for their pilots, and as he smiled he looked around as if searching for something pleasant he had seen out of the corner of his eyes. Corran Horn in Imperial uniform walked between the ranks with calmness and dignity, without the red-bladed lightsaber he had turned on the true Imperials. The battered, so varied crowd exploded into clapping, whooping, Bothans shouting enthusiastic battle cries. Kit knew what they were doing, thinking, so he shouted with them.

"Our heroes' battles and victories are all of yours! _Each of us _worked to _save _the galaxy." The crowd roared. The seven heroes stood to either side of the podium, straight and serious and smiling. Kit quieted then, and gripped the sides of his podium, a former computer console.

"And there is one of us who should be here; should be _here_, standing in front." Kit's sibilant voice had captured everyone, and now as he injected solemnity into the occasion they all felt it as a terrible, choreographed sadness. "Luke Skywalker is missing in action, working to cut off the head of the Empire. Without Master Skywalker none of this would have ever happened. We'll find out what's happened to him; then the celebration can be complete. A search will go out as soon as possible." The Force had _settled_, that was the word, maybe half an hour ago as the terrestrial battle subsided. It had returned to an excited version of its familiar state, to Kit's great relief. So Luke had succeeded. But had he succeeded _alive_? "So think of his work and yours as you go on with your lives. We still need you; the Rebellion still lives on."

"Right." Han Solo broke into the hastily rehearsed speech. "No medals? We better party good so the kid doesn't think we've all been wiped out when he gets back."

"Well spoken." Kit said. "Very well spoken."

**L**uke casually stole an officer's spaceyacht, docked for repairs now almost completed, out of the Had Abbadon base. He predicted it wouldn't be much missed after the deck officer reported that it was Darth Vader who commissioned the ship.

**H**is father had given him images or memories, each overlaid with a present terrible in comparison. Anakin, tall and with one tight braid lying against his right shoulder, sat across an elegant and simple table from a woman whose features suggested a mixture of kind quietude and hidden assertiveness. Secrecy was wrapped about her and the whole place, and Anakin counted this the moment of happiness and peace against which he judged all others of his life. The present of the place was warring and overlaid with hated beurocracy, and of the woman blindingly, tearingly painful. Luke knew he had found, finally, the face of his mother.

There was another memory where Anakin and another, more refined looking man with red-blonde hair and beard walked through a carpeted, vaulted hall. Anakin had tacked Force sense onto the memory almost as naturally as he did sight, hearing and smell, so Luke could recognize the companion as Ben Kenobi. Obi-wan was saying; "Live in the influence of the Force, Padawan, but you must know when your emotions are moving that awareness toward into a touch with the dark side." The present filled the hall with scorches of laser and plasma, smoke, were those stormtroopers' bodies, the smell of death, and a frightening unleashed happiness.

Luke felt a shiver run through him.

Then Anakin was fighting, just playing with blade combat opposite a Kushiban about the height of Yoda, who jumped about striking with a light purple lightsaber. Anakin loved to fight, because he knew he was good at it. The practice stopped by consent, and Anakin sat on the sidelines with a group of people; the Kushiban, a tall Zabrak female, a blue-skinned Twi'lek, Obi-wan. Anakin enjoyed this time, though even the casual company of good-hearted Jedi could grate on him sometimes. And the overlay of this hurt like that of the other scene in the temple had. Anakin couldn't move that way anymore.

These memories settled into Luke's as if they were old, vivid dreams. He leaned back and ran his hands through his hair. The secrets of the old order Jedi were hidden still, and the fate of a new order secured; Luke had decided what to tell Kit when he got back. Something inside Luke, not-quite-last Jedi Master, had been broken and mended and broken again, and mended in a different way. Again a jumble of thoughts chased each other around in his head and were this time finally capped of by a thought; _Life _continues as does pain, and dulls pain to an intriguing luster over the soul. Feeling introspective, he thought that perhaps to experience the fight, the strife the death _again _was the entire point of experiencing it first.


	44. Many Meetings

**J**edi Master Kell had nearly fallen asleep in her chair in the small conference room of Maw Installation, waiting for a signal from another world. A Republic officer, a young human wearing red and a convex helmet, appeared at the door looking ruffled. Of course it had taken some time to find them.

"Master Jedi."

Kell looked up.

"We've finished with the basic clean-up here...will you be staying?"

Kell licked her lips and looked around. Paqs Patra boredly returned her gaze and stretched his wings. De'shar unfolded her arms--she and the smuggler had begun a heated discussion on the moral aspects of spice-running--and said firmly, "My mission is over. The report that will go to Coruscant will be that the Jedi apprehended the smugglers of vague dangerous technology. Force knows it's been done before." She began to walk out, determination and hesitation warring in her sense. Kell surmised that the agent did see her job as done, but that she would be thinking it over for a long time indeed. Kell could almost regret her sudden departure.

The soldier observantly asked, "What about Luke Skywalker?"

De'shar paused beside the man in the doorway. Kell braced a hand on the tabletop beside her and said, "We need to wait a little longer." She didn't keep the worry out of her voice, or the anger at waiting with so many variables pulled down around her head .

The human nodded. De'shar said, "I'll expect a full report when Skywalker comes back." She looked into her companions' eyes each in turn, and with an unexpected reserved smile in her sense, left the doorway and disappeared from view. The soldier nodded again as she passed, and Kell turned to Patra.

"You're just as free to go."

"No I'm not." He looked at her with bright eyes. "I owe you my freedom. And some vaping good flying."

"Ah the Honor of the criminal." De'shar said sarcastically, humorously, sliding back in.

**S**now plumed over and across the white plains of Hoth in the parallel universe. Luke Skywalker relished speed and a laughing, clear power as he guided the spaceyacht to an unplanned-looking landing outside Echo Base, holding on to slim lines of control with hands and mind. The repairs being performed on the Imperial craft had been to the connected landing mechanisms, thus the hull-scraping decent that shook Luke as the ship jarred to a halt within long view of the mountains where Echo Base had been. Then it settled on the snow piled ground, and Luke unstrapped himself and took the shortest route to the boarding ramp of the yacht. He could sense Kit and Bade waiting for him out in the snow that had begun to slant across the plain, so he unhesitantly moved toward them.

The wind started to pick up; the snow feathered Luke's black clothes and his hair and settled on the thick tentacles at the top of Kit's skull. The two Jedi clasped hands warmly and turned toward the warmth of the yellow light in the distance. Bade clapped Luke on the shoulder but pulled his hand away quickly as if the human might be hurt. "Welcome home, Commander."

Luke was grateful for Bade's consideration. He had felt a shiver at the so-casual souch, an uncomfortable prickle of remnant lightning-pain.

Kit quickly said, "So you fixed the Force."

Luke couldn't resist smiling. "It was fixed _with my help_. But the Emperor is defeated...Darth Vader dead."

Bade gaped in the Force while his masked face remained impassive. Kit grinned.

They passed between the half-opened bay doors into the artificial light. Bade rapped on the doors to get them to close and preserve the heat that Luke could now feel wafting around the secondary, first-floor hanger. People were sitting around, on boxes, mats, the sloped edges of snowspeeder bodies or high snubfighter's wings, drinking caf or hot chocolate or various mild inebriants (mild because some of them were still spooked, ready for an Imperial retaliation) from one hundred ship's holds. Voices floated in a covering cloud that almost smoothed war's harsh angles and reminded Luke of a never realized...home.

Han emerged from a group gathered in the center of the hanger around a brazier, with an insulated, orange-steaming cup in his hand. Paqs Patra was there with Han's group, and was that in the corner Corran Horn? Luke sensed the "reformed" Imperial-slash- transposed Jedi trying to tell him something, heading toward them, but he said _Later _because that fit into the plans. Inside, Luke was ecstatic that Corran had found this universe and had no idea how that was possible, so he objected none at all when Corran continued in his direction with the mein of a rebel slightly separated from the jollification around him.

"Kid," Han said to Luke, falsely serious, 'I can't believe you're not dead!" Then, conspiratorily, "Way to skip the war. We could've used a good pilot."

Luke grinned sheepishly. "I had Jedi business, Han. You know I would've loved to be up there with you." It was true, Luke found, only tainted the tiniest bit by a aged knowledge of ruthless combat. He looked approvingly at the weathered people and sleek lines of resting starfighters. Pockets of sorrow rose throughout the general partylike Force-miasma.

"So humble for a Jedi Master." Kit laughed, looking sideways.

"Jedi Master!" Han sputtered, then shrugged as if it were a joke. "Come on, if you move quickly noone'll want you to make a speech."

Luke handed the metal sphere he held to Kit with a thought that said _keep this safe, I'll come for it later._ The Nautolan nodded, nowhere near as grim as he could be, and Luke went with Han to a circle of pilots and everyman-heros, the sort of people Luke could be relaxed with, who boasted of their exploits and gave him the extreme favor of not asking him to recount any of his.


	45. Finale

_None of you know how scared I am to finish this. To look at it and say "it's over', and 'it could be better."_

_This is the End._

_To F. Scott Fitzgerald._

_Also to Yaz, who is in the X-wing they're standing under, squished in with "Tamizander" Cy, trying not to freeze._

Chapter 45

Luke, Corran, and Kit stood below the nose of an X-Wing whose pilot slept in the cockpit, gathering warmth around her while outside it spread into the chilling air.

"Your leaving will be absolutely dangerous to all of these people." Kit spoke grimly, his hands folded into wide sleeves. Beneath his mien into his mind there was an enduring semi-seriousness, a detached contentment. "You can know the future without the Force; such a thing would be invaluable to the Rebellion."

Luke looked up and enjoyed the heat on his face. He would forever find a place that was so eternally cold unnatural. "I don't really know the future. Certain things happened to me, but already there was incredible differences. All I could give these people is military experience, and that you have."

"I've got hints for you." Corran said conspiratorially. "There's this barve named Kyle Katarn, who works for Alliance Intel somewhere.. Recruit him. And that cloning equipment on Byss _must _go." He pretended to shudder.

Luke imitated Corran, and then seriously caught Kit's gaze. "The war will go on until the navy and government leadership of the Alliance is strong enough to make a peace with the Empire in which it can no longer subjugate free beings. It looks like we've done that but what is coming is chaos for the galaxy. What will give hope in that?"

"The Jedi academy." said the Nautolan, and they grinned at each other. "Built on the model of the Temple."

This was the part that excited Luke, that brought back old plans of a gold-gilded future; here was a Jedi Master, a Ben Kenobi in his prime, to rebuilt an academy with full knowledge of the ways of the old _and _what had brought its downfall. He almost wished to stay and see the results, but wished also to breathe the air of the place where he had been born, perhaps one day to return and look on a Republic grander than his weary galaxy could offer...

He realized then that thoughts of politics had not bothered him in the whole span of his time on this world, that his appearance had been less than his actions in the eyes of those around him, that this was a blank canvas. He was leaving it, and it made the return so bittersweet.

Corran said, "By the way now, we _did _find out where the universe machines originated. He's no problem now; the reports came just before I left the Star Destroyer that one of our more prominent scientists had been found dead. I felt ripples; his conciousnesses warred like ours, erm, mine did, and he couldn't take it. Maybe only Jedi can."

Luke nodded. "Of course." They had filled each other in on the two sides of the saga a few minutes ago, in the morning of a celebration that for some had lasted the whole night. "That does make sense; it means Han will never get to see the other self he is so jealous of." Luke chuckled. "Kit. This around us is the backbone of the Alliance; people like Raylsk and Sidi will be great some day, and Bade is what every soldier can learn from." Sigh. "I will miss them." And he had the news that Sidi Driss had been one more victim.

Kit said, "We'll miss you, Luke. May the Force be with you."

Corran and Luke wrapped the tail of the Emperor's machine around their forearms, and in the Force found the space-time location of its brother in the Maw. Luke tried to hold onto the sphere but it dissolved beneath his fingers, and Kit had said he would destroy it, to protect from threat and to stabilize the worlds.

Kell and De'shar and Patra leapt up at their arrival, and Luke embraced Kell and told her that he would explain why he was so cold later. She said the Republic had left them a ship. Luke saw Patra and took a blink to figure it out, after which point Patra cocked his head and looked to De'shar for an assurance of reality. She bowed before Luke, angry and honored and trained to know the hero by face.

Kit Fisto looked out the great bay doors on Hoth to where the stars shone through a veil fallen from the Death Star, and remembered Coruscant, and his homeworld Glee Anselm with its quietly floating continents.

...where a few months later he would stand and watch an AT-AT, the young man inside waving roguishly to his old commander with the dark cockpit turning the stripes across his cheeks a deep navy, push a wall into place beside the durasteel and rock of the others with the top of the machine's head. The sun shone. A circle of teens and adults sat behind him on the slope that lead down to the bright water, their heads bent together, and strains of power connected them to the rock slab and everything.

There was a debriefing on Yavin IV, but it was really more of a welcome-home party and even De'shar attended among the Jedi looking relaxed as long as Patra stood next to her, his feathery skin sleek. Luke remembered, and distanced himself without looking like he was savoring every moment. Kell took the crowds with the beginning of a story. Luke flicked his eyes to the blue sky, and stepped under the shadow of the great Temple's hanger, and breathed again air that smelled like his home.

And the past flowed on, and the Plot stayed strong, and the future rushed gently up to meet them all.


End file.
